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The Bible the 
Word of God 

By F. BETTEX 



^^ Das Wort sie sollen las sen stahn^ 
Und kein' n Dank dazu haben. ' ' 

— Luther 



TRANSLATED FROM THE THIRD ENLARGED GERMAN EDITION 




CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



3 



^^'^^^ 






LIBRARY nf CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

AUG 4 1904 
Copyrfeht Entry 

CLASS ClxAno. 

f L ^ f 

' COPY b' 



COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY 
JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 



Contents 

CHAPTER I 



PAGE 



Knowledge and Faith, -"' - - - - - 5 

CHAPTER II 
The Bible, -------- 52 

CHAPTER III 
Objections, - _- - - - - - - 170 

CHAPTER IV 
Biblical Criticism, - - - - - - 215 

CHAPTER V 
Biblical Faith, - -302 



The Bible the Word of God. 

it, 



I. 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH 



''Das ist das Ende der Philosophie; 
zu wissen, dass wir glauben muessen." 



WHAT DO WE KNOW? 



—GEIBEL. 



Cast into this mysterious world without our knowl- 
edge or our choice; a prey of the forces of nature; the 
sport of circumstances and of our fellow-men; doomed 
to die, and yet uncertain as to when, where, and how the 
sentence of death is to be executed, — we are, after all, 
unspeakably miserable and "through fear of death sub- 
ject to bondage." 

And yet we find within us an inexterminable longing, 
not only for joy and peace, life and power, but also for 
knowledge. Even the soul of the child, beholding the 
world surrounding it, is filled with awe and wonder, and, 
seized with a desire for knowledge, asks incessantly. 
What is this? What is that? For it feels unconsciously 
that it grows through knowledge ; it appropriates to itself 
things foreign to it, assimilates its surroundings, makes 
them subservient to itself, and rules over them. Satan 



6 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

well knew this mighty primal impulse of the human soul, 
and enticed it by the promise, "Ye shall be as gods, know- 
ing good and evil." 

What do we know? Much. What an immeasurable 
wealth of knowledge millions of men have accumulated 
during six thousand years, of which only a very small 
part has ever, for a time at least, been perpetuated in 
writing! For even if we knew all books and all manu- 
scripts of all times, we should yet not know the history of 
hundreds of peoples and tribes, with their language, their 
customs, their laws, their views of the world and of na- 
ture, their civilization and their art. For even in the days 
of Cortez and Pizarro neither the Peruvians nor the more 
advanced Mexicans had any knowledge of an alphabet; 
the former contenting themselves with quipu language, 
the latter with hieroglyphics. And when we bear in mind 
to what an astonishing degree even wild tribes of fisher- 
men and huntsmen are cognizant of nature ; when we bear 
in mind the millions of observations made by Indians and 
Samoyedes, by Bushmen and Tartars, concerning plant 
life and animal life, on which they are dependent for their 
livelihood, we are amazed at the mass of man's knowl- 
edge. 

Observing more closely, we are at once aware, of 
course, that there is a difference between knowledge and 
wisdom; between the mere knowledge of facts and phe- 
nomena, and the cognizance of their connection, their 
causes, their import, and their value. Even here opinions 
as to the much or little of man's knowledge differ. 

Thus Socrates ironically summed up his knowledge in 
the sentence, "I know that I know nothing," and the wise 
Solomon, well versed in natural science, said: *'I gave 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH, 7 

my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all 
things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath 
God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith." 
"I said, I will be wise ; but it [wisdom] was far from me. 
That which is, is far off, and exceeding deep, who can 
find it out?" (Eccles. i, 13; vii, 23, 24.) And Goethe 
sighs: "Ich sehe, dass wir nichts wissen koennen; das 
will mir schier das Herz verbrennen." 

But those were ancient people in ancient days, almost 
simple in their modesty, who were ever ready to confess, 
^1 do not know." Such words are no longer proper 
among us modern people, in an age that drops knowledge 
and wisdom. "Thirty years ago the nature of disease was 
not known." "There is nothing that science can not 
search out." Such boasts are heard daily. Or, as a 
French savant recently exclaimed, "II n'y a plus de mys- 
tere!" (There is no longer any mystery!) Such boasts 
of the daily press, and the hymns of praise to human 
knowledge and ability, please the masses, and to them are 
lucid truths, deniedonly by reactionaries and pessimists 
for the purpose of keeping the masses ignorant. But 
those having true knowledge do not speak thus. They 
repeat the words of one of the chief among them : "There 
is little that we know ; there is very much that we do not 

know." 

Whence have we our knowledge? How do we ac- 
quire it? 

When we enter this world, we unconsciously estab- 
lish ourselves as a unit, an ego, that exists, has a right to 
exist, and exists as that which it is. For me the world is 
founded on this faith, this principle of identity: a=a, 
j^j^ ego=ego {Ich bin, der ich bin). Here faith and 



8 THH BIBLE THB WORD OP GOD. 

sight are one. But this is merely a matter of conscious- 
ness, an mtuition. That I am, is undemonstrable. The 
world's phdosophers have never yet fathomed, and all our 
learnmg has not yet told us the real meaning of the little 
words "I" and "to be." Even the well-known fundamental 
tenet of the Cartesian philosophy, "I think, therefore I 
am, is equal in its content to "I am, for I am " "I am 
and I am he, who I am," is the axiom, the firm assump- 
tion and conviction essential to all thinking. It were 
madness to doubt it, and an impossibility to prove it to 
him who no longer believes it, and is mentally deranged 
_ Man proceeds from himself as an entity, and as sub- 
ject lays hold upon the world as object. Without this 
fundamental believing there is no possibility of man's 
knowmg. Yea, life, the joy of life, consists in bein- 
strong enough as subject to control the non-ego as object 
imitating God, the highest and absolute ego, for whom 
the universe is mere object; suffering, on the other hand, 
consists in feeling one's self treated as object by this 
world, the non-ego. 

If we ask on what man's further cognition and knowl- 
edge are based, the simple answer is: On the senses 
and on faith in what they tell us. Even the ancients knew 
there is nothing in the mind of man that does not enter 
through the senses. What could a man without senses 
know of himself and the universe? When a child enters 
this world. It opens its eyes, hears with its ears, grasps 
with Its hands, and believes what its senses tell it of the 
world of light, sound, and matter. It believes that the 
tree is green, that the sky is blue, that the stone is hard 
that the quadrilateral has four corners, that the trianHe 
has three, and that 1+1=2. Man believes these things 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH, 9 

for he can never comprehend, and his eye can not tell 
him, why and how it sees; his ear can not tell him how 
it hears, nor his hand how it feels. Upon this faith in 
what he sees, hears, and feels, man gradually constructs 
his view of the world. Knowledge begins and ends with 
seeing. "They shall see God." And it argues nothing 
to the contrary that we strive to perfect our knowledge 
of the world by means of all sorts of ingenious appara- 
tus ; for we can use such apparatus only by means of the 
senses. What would a telephone profit the deaf, or a 
spectroscope the blind ? 

But do I know that things really are as I perceive 
them ? Is not the world of my perceptions an illusionary 
juggle of my senses that has little or nothing in common 
with the real world? That our senses are limited, need 
not be proven. That they tell us something, but not the 
whole, of heat, electricity, gravitation, and other forces, 
every learned person well knows. But limitation is not 
negation. The dimmest light is still light, and the fact 
that our love and hope are weak does not argue that there 
is no love and hope. To assume that the world as it ap- 
pears, and consequently our language and all our think- 
ing relative thereto (as when we speak of ardent love, 
clear knowledge, great or small power), is an entirely 
erroneous picture of the world as it really is, is to assume 
that the Creator has intentionally deceived and contin- 
ually deceives His creatures, that He is not a God of truth, 
but of falsehood, or that there is no God, and that the 
world is merely a disconnected work of chance, in which 
logical conclusions are impossible. Neither assumption 
is entertained by the Christian. It is written : "The in- 
visible things of Him from the creation of the world are 



lo THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

clearly seen, being understood by the things that are 
made, even His eternal power and Godhead ; so that they 
are without excuse." How could this be possible, how 
could they seek Him in His creation, that "they haply 
might feel after Him and find Him," if it were only 
semblance and deception? To the Christian the visible 
Cosmos is a reflection and an effect of the invisible Cos- 
mos, although he knows that knowledge through sense- 
perception has been alarmingly darkened by the fall of 
man. No scholar or investigator has ever been able to 
show that we do not perceive at least a phase of things, 
or that "the thing-in-itself" has nothing in common with 
its phenomena, — an unphilosophic assumption, utterly 
contradictory to reason, the more since this "thing-in- 
itself" is the cause of all visible things. 

Thus the sum total of our knowledge is based on 
faith in our senses. I can never have any knowledge of 
fire, except I burn myself, nor of getting wet, save 
through contact with water; and if it is not in reality 
true that fire burns and water wets, all our knowing and 
thinking is at an end. 

Concerning what does sense-perception give informa- 
tion? Evidently only concerning that which is perceiv- 
able by means of the senses. My eyes tell me the tree 
is green. Why it is green and not blue, neither my 
senses nor all my apparatus tell me. And they are utterly 
silent as to the main question, viz., what end this particu- 
lar color may serve for the tree, and of what consequence 
this individual fact is for the universe. Our senses, 
themselves phenomena of unknown psychic forces, can 
inform us only concerning the phenomena of the universe, 
but they can not enter the realm of principles and causes ; 



KNOWLBDGB AND FAITH. n 

i. e., they can not enlighten us in regard to the real 
essence, the how and why of things, nor in regard to 
ourselves. And they are limited even in the realm of 
the visible. 

The study of nature has revealed much that is beau- 
tiful and magnificent. With their two eyes, the micro- 
scope and the telescope, investigators are diligently and 
untiringly pressing deeper and deeper into things small 
and great. The order of diatomacese, those crystal shells 
of microscopic creatures, unnumbered billions of which 
inhabit the waters and seas of the earth, reveal thousands 
of neat, elegant, and fascinating forms. With his giant 
telescope the astronomer reverently beholds white, blue, 
purple, and green suns revolving about one another, ap- 
parently slowly, but in reality with terrible rapidity, and 
together hastening through the depths of space. And 
from out the depths of the ocean, from out the mys- 
terious, eternally cold, lightless, silent abysmal region 
we take uncanny creatures, gleaming in their own colored 
light, some black, with hideous teeth and stupidly staring 
eyes, like demons from hell. But even here man finds 
himself surrounded by adamant walls, forbidding his en- 
tering farther. Our eyes, themselves composed of atoms, 
will never behold the world of atoms, nor will our in- 
struments ever lay hold on it. Matter can not see nor 
seize itself. Concerning astronomy, Kant exclaimed, 
"The most important feature of it is, that it discloses to 
us the abyss of our ignorance." How true this is in our 
day ! What do we know about the five hundred millions, 
yea, thousand millions of suns they hope to be able to 
place by photographing the heavens, and which no human 
eye will ever see, not even through the most powerful 



12 



THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 



telescope? What possibilities of being and development 
of existence, of life, of matter, and of mind! The part 
of the universe that we survey is small, exceedingly small 
a spot invisible from yonder worlds, its ratio to the whole' 
inconceivably less than the ratio of an atom to the earth 
Despite all knowledge and ability, mankind, separated 
from the source of light and knowledge, is like a ship- 
wrecked crew carried about on a raft of their own con- 
struction, and without a compass, by a shoreless, un- 
fathomable ocean. And if a storm arise we are lost. 
^ With the facts and phenomena of the universe the 
creator, therefore, acts like a wise father, who does not 
give his son a completed structure, leaving nothing more 
to be done, but gives him single stones, with which in a 
style suited to his individuality, he may himself construct 
a building. Thus from the ever-accumulating facts per- 
ceived either by his own senses or the senses of others 
man consciously or unconsciously deduces a conception of 
tlie universe that constitutes his knowledge, his science 
This conception he will invariably connect with his idea of 
the causes and the moral law of the universe; i e with 
his conception of good and evil. He can not do other- 
wise, his explanation of mere facts and bare phenomena 
must have an intellectual background. 

Man's explanation of facts and phenomena will al- 
ways accommodate itself to his innermost life, to the 
.great affirmations or negations, the light or the dark- 
ness, the love or the hatred of his soul. Those who like 
A. Comte and his followers, the French positivists' and 
the English agnostics, pretended to be content with a 
knowledge of mere facts, and who would have denied to 
men the right of taking the moral value of phenomena 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH, 13 

into account, have ever, like Comte himself, become bank- 
rupts in a very short time. "It is useless," says Kant, 
"to ieign unconcern in view of investigations whose sub- 
ject matter must concern human nature. And the 
would-be indifferentists, if they think at all, inevitably 
relapse into the very metaphysical assertions of which 
they had feigned contempt." (Foreword to Critique of 
Pure Reason.) 

Modern science, of course, frequently demands that 
I look away from my individuality, and measure heat and 
cold by the thermometer, and not by my feelings; that 
my system receive a certain per cent of albumen and phos- 
phate daily, whether the food eaten strengthens me and 
I relish it, or not. Just so in the realm of the spiritual. 
Since God can not be proved experimentally, this "hy- 
pothesis," as Laplace called the idea of God, must be 
stricken from science. Others say neither religion nor 
morality should have a place in science, since good and 
evil can be distinguished neither chemically nor physic- 
ally. We operate exclusively with and on the basis of 
facts and numbers; with and on the basis of that alone 
which is absolutely certain. All else is a matter of in- 
dividual concern, and has no scientific value. That seems 
evident to many. But, in the first place, neither facts nor 
figures, i. e., our conception, our valuation, our verdict 
relative thereto — are absolutely correct; for it must be 
clear to every one, e. g., that we can not measure or 
weigh a piece of metal absolutely. Even in this respect, 
then, our knowledge is only relatively, not absolutely, 
true. In the second place, a science dealing exclusively 
with facts and figures, if such a science were at all possi- 
ble, would have no intellectual value, and scientific re- 



14 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

search that did not appeal to the intellect, and excluded all 
faith, would be like the mechanical clatter of a mill 
Facts and figures in themselves are no more science than 
a dictionary is language. The intellectual background, 
the explanation of facts, the ideas underlying them— 
and the greatest investigators have considered these of 
more importance than the observance of facts— and their 
combination to an orderly structure, these alone consti- 
tute science. Natural science and cosmophysics have no 
mtellectual value without metaphysics (which lives on 
faith) as a background; and, fortunately, man is so highly 
organized that knowledge without faith can not satisfy 
him. The investigator is constantly inquiring. Why d^d 
it come to be thus? The question itself presupposes 
causality. He is ever inquiring for what purpose plants 
polyps, infusoria, have such or such organs, and takes 
for granted a teleological arrangement of the universe, 
and a wise primal cause. He is constantly striving to as- 
certain a higher cause for material phenomena, and what 
relation the individual phenomenon sustains to the whole 
thus entering the realm of individual faith, which faith 
IS associated with the fundamental formula of his soul 
and his ego. Even the most godless scientist weaves a 
great deal of faith into his view of the world. Thus 
Haeckel, in order to explain heredity, sets up the dogma 
of the unconscious memory of the molecule, and expects 
us, merely on his authority, to 'Relieve" a thing so in- 
conceivable. And upon examination there is found in 
many scientific works a residuum of stronger faith than 
"is found in Israel." Thus many believe that the world 
originated spontaneously, that something suddenly arose 
out of nothing; how, for what purpose, and why, no man 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH, 15 

knows! And those believing these things, praise the 
exact and positive sciences over against reHgious myths 
and dogmas. 

Here, also, mankind is ever wavering and swinging 
like a pendulum between two extreme poles. After the 
natural philosophy of Schelling and Oncken, which, it 
is true, was ofttimes rather bold, superficial minds 
thought they could dispense with the spirit in natural 
research, and exclaimed : "No more metaphysics ! Noth- 
ing but exact natural science!" A little reflection will 
show upon what an uncertain basis this exact natural 
research rests. In his important work "Das Weltgesetz 
des kleinsten Kraftaufwandes," Dr. G. Portig says : "A 
deeper study shows that natural science is full of hy- 
potheses. The truly important leaders asknowledge it; 
only those ranking second and third deceive themselves 
and others by hastily passing off as scientifically true 
what is merely conjecture." Concerning these hypotheses 
Professor Dr. Drehef writes : "All hypotheses of exact 
natural science are rooted in presuppositions which to our 
thought seem inadmissible." (Die Grundlage der exak- 
ten Naturwissenschaft in Lichte der Kritik.) This is 
true of the atom, of gravitation (since a body is said to 
operate, where it does not exist, which^ as is well known, 
Newton also found inexplicable), of the light-wave 
theory, etc. Arthur Wilke {Centralzeitung fuer Optik 
imd Mechanik) asserts that we can never expect an an- 
swer to the question. What is electricity? That elec- 
tricity, like other conceptions of forces, is merely an aux- 
iliary conception by which many natural processes are 
united; and that it is an error to suppose that out in 
nature there is a distinct something that answers to our 



1 6 THE BIBLB THE WORD OF GOD. 

conception of electricity; that, on the whole, the ques- 
tion, ''What exists?" can not be answered, no matter to 
what it may pertain. 

But even a so-called "exact" science becomes insipid 
and unsatisfactory to man. All knowledge is to man 
what the rigging is to a ship. Masts, yards, and sails 
are intended to help her along, and without them she is 
lifeless; but what do they all profit her, if the wind fail 
her? Even Socrates complains in "Phaedo," that the 
scientists of his day constructed systems out of many 
facts, but could not say why just such a condition of 
things is good for the individual, and to what extent 
the good of the individual is also the good of the whole. 
That knowledge alone has value which can be turned 
into good, or, as we Christians say, which serves as the 
rounds of a ladder in order to mount to God. Of what 
great importance is the struggle for or against Darwin- 
ism? The origin of species in itself, as well as the 
whole world of phenomena, needs be of no importance to 
me at all, if I am not shown what eternal values the soul 
gains or loses by its truth or fallacy. This even his heart 
feels, whose mind has not clearly grasped it. As in art 
and literature bare naturalism rapidly made way for 
idealism (even though ofttimes morbid), so natural re- 
search is turning back to natural philosophy. Hear on 
this point, R. France, Professor Otto Lyon, G. Portig, 
Brunetiere, Pasteur, or keen-eyed Ed. v. Hartmann. The 
latter writes (Foreword to Schelling's System of Phi- 
losophy) : "The age of exact natural science is nearing 
its end." "The study of the theory of knowledge, of 
psychology, and ethics, pursued during the past genera- 
tion, has convulsively closed its eyes against metaphysics. 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. i? 

and has therefore led to a dead point." "A natural phi- 
losophy or scientific metaphysic must be regained that 
shall bridge over the existing chasm between natural 
science on the one hand, and modern mental culture on 
the other." 

But only the Word of God and faith in the Word of 
God are able to construct such a bridge that shall endure 
eternally; and this fact is overlooked by modern scholars. 

We all, mankind as a whole, the educated and the 
uneducated, art and science, idealists and realists, believe 
— believe in things we have never seen. Mathematics 
believes in axioms, chemistry believes in atoms and mole- 
cules, physics in cosmic ether and contradictory attributes 
in bodies, astronomy in the incomprehensible infinity of 
space, all natural science in invisible natural forces and 
natural laws. We know, the latter exclaims, that these 
laws and forces are eternal. Nay, we only believe it. 
We can not even prove that bodies have eternally at- 
tracted one another, and that they will eternally do so. 
But since we can not imagine what the condition of 
things would be if they did not attract one another, we 
lay down for our own comfort the article of faith, the 
dogma of their eternal mutual attraction. And this is 
true of many other things. Thus the structure of our 
knowledge, apparently firmly joined, rests, like the pal- 
aces of Venice and Amsterdam, on subterranean waters 
of "faith." 

Even where we think we have examined a thing to 
the very bottom, we are deceived. This is true of Dar- 
winism. It is indeed disappearing, as it came; for the 
evidence of geology, of the fauna of the deep seas, of 
the study pf the plancton, is too strong against it, and 



1 8 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

the number of scientists deserting it is increasing daily. 
Other theories are taking its place. In the convention of 
German scientists in Hamburg, 1901, Dr. H. de Bries 
and men like Koelliker emphasized "the stability of 
species," as well as "their saltatorial development," and, 
approximating to Bible and geology, advocated "muta- 
tions," sudden, "explosion-like modifications of species," 
veritable "shatterings of species." But even supposing 
Darwinism, with all its consequences, to be true, what 
would be gained ? Would we know what life is, or how 
it originated on the earth? Would we know what con- 
sciousness is, and how it comes about, or what matter 
and spirit are ? Would we at last have found the bridge 
between the body and the soul, or know how, why, and 
to what end the universe exists, and whence good and evil 
are? No. In his ingenious work, "Der Wert der Wis- 
senschaft," Raoul France properly expresses surprise at 
the fact that such great importance is attached to so sec- 
ondary a question as the origin of species; and we add, 
many scholars imagine that, by a highly problematic an- 
swer to this question, they have solved the mysteries of 
creation. But we commonly confound the observation 
and description of cosmic phenomena with the explana- 
tion of the same. If to explain means to find and show 
the essence proper of things, their real how and why, we 
must admit that science has never yet explained anything. 
After all, then, we know practically nothing. For 
we know only that which is external and superficial, but 
not that which is within and enduring ; we know phenom- 
ena, but not the underlying principle ; the relative, but not 
the absolute; the temporal but not the eternal. We can 
write innumerable books on man's behavior, on what he 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 19 

has done during past centuries, and what he is doing to- 
day. But what man really is, what / am^ I can not find 
out ; I do not know what my soul and my body are, and 
how one reacts on the other. I have senses, but I do not 
know how they operate, how they give me knowledge of 
things; in short, I am hidden from myself, which is 
shown by the simple fact that I can not look into myself, 
do not know what organs I have in me ; and if the machin- 
ery does not perform its normal functions, physicians 
advise and consult and can not find out where there is a 
screw loose. And if I turn to the world, my ignorance is 
just as great. We do not know, and shall never know 
here below, what matter is; consequently, we can not 
fathom the material world. We do not know, and shall 
never know here below, what spirit is; consequently, we 
can not comprehend the spiritual world. Therefore in 
six thousand years we have made no progress toward 
answering the questions : How and why have I come to 
be? For what ptirpose do I exist? Why am I placed 
under obligation ? Whither am I hastening ? Those who 
call themselves the learned and enlightened answer, No 
man knows. Thus A. v. Humboldt, the man whose 
"Cosmos" was so enthusiastically welcomed as a lucid 
presentation and survey of the entire field of human 
knowledge, wrote shortly before his death : 'Xife is the 
greatest folly. After striving and investigating for 
eighty years, one must at last admit that he has gained 
and found out nothing. Would that we at least knew to 
what end we are in this world." Behind us, nothing; in 
front of us, eternal night; round about us dense fog! 
And yet we desire to know. ''Ich sehe, dass zvir nichfs 
wissen koennen, das zvill mir schier das Herz verhrennen," 



20 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

Science and reason! The two ideas that in our day- 
control the notions of civiHzed mankind, as once the idea 
of eternity controlled the Egyptians, the idea of beauty 
of body and soul controlled the Greeks, the idea of power 
and of the state controlled the Romans; but with this 
difference between us and the ancients, that their ideas 
to them were symbols of eternal things, gifts of the gods 
coming from on high. To them beauty was divine. The 
blessed gods granted strength and power and prosperity. 
We no longer believe in gods, and in science we reverence 
our knowledge, in reason our wisdom. Examined closely, 
our worship of science and reason is a naive adoration of 
our own ability, a worship of our own ego. Here, too, 
man leans on a broken reed. We have seen how and why 
his knowledge is incomplete and impotent. But his rea- 
son! True, God has granted reason to the soul, a ca- 
pacity to view this world intelligently, to utilize it prop- 
erly, to arrange his affairs in it practically. It is well 
known that reason has kept millions from leading an 
irrational, and thousands from leading an over-rational, 
life. In every-day life it is eminently useful; in the 
higher and intellectual life it profits little or nothing, for 
it is not the spirit. Indeed, these two, as may be seen in 
the gifted artist, seldom dwell together peaceably, and 
are inclined to despise each other. Reason is not only 
individual, but also national. Just as it points out dif- 
ferent things to the sanguine person and to the phleg- 
matic, so it tells the Chinese mandarin one thing, the Eng- 
lish lord another. It is also a product of its time. The 
doctors of Salamanca rationally proved to Columbus 
that, even if the earth were round, he might descend on 
the one side, but could not possibly ascend again on the 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 21 

other; and fifty years ago many of the present "attain- 
ments of science" were rejected with disdain by rational 
persons as wild fancies and irrational imaginings of 
lunatics. For reason always operates with, and its con- 
clusions depend upon, the knowledge of its day. It pro- 
duces nothing, but only utilizes what it receives. It can 
— simple as it may sound — predicate nothing of what it 
does not know. If there were no tree in all the earth, 
the reasoning power of all mankind combined could not 
tell whether there are trees at all in the universe, nor how 
a tree is and must be. If God had created the earth's at- 
mosphere somewhat less transparent, human reason, be 
it ever so acute, would know nothing of sun, moon, and 
stars ; would not anticipate that millions of cosmic bodies 
revolve about us. Therefore the assertion that it is irra- 
tional to believe in a superterrestrial world of angels and 
spirits, belongs to the most irrational, therefore to the 
most stupid thinkable, that a man can make. 

What we call reason is therefore something com- 
posite, a product, on the one hand, of a ps3^chic faculty; 
on the other hand, of prevailing ideas and circumstances, 
of the degree of knowledge attained to, and even of in- 
dividuality and temperament. Therefore it is a variable 
quantity, differing in each individual. For whence comes 
contention in art and science, in public and private life; 
whence the struggle in national and international politics 
and statecraft, tariff, and commercial treaties, elective 
franchise and taxes, and many other things in the Reichs- 
tag, at the beer table, and in the press, if it does not arise 
from difference of "the reasons" {"Vernuenfte"), of 
which, according to the latest calculations, there are six- 
teen hundred millions on earth? Which of these shall I 



22 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

trust? "My own, of course," is the modest answer of 
every rational man; and it is correct, inasmuch as every 
man, simply because he is not like his neighbor, must 
house with his own reason and taste. But if there be a 
clash between his reason and mine, or, as we see it daily, 
between the ruler's and his subject's, between the em- 
ployer's and the employee's, between the husband's and 
the wife's, between the father's and the son's — and all 
claim to be rational beings — then the delicate question 
always arises : Who is to decide whose reason is the more 
rational ? Where is the arbiter of all these reasons ( Ver- 
nuenfte) ? The question is not answered, and for the 
time being each one contents himself with the fundamen- 
tal thought, and strives, more or less energetically or 
pleasingly, to impress it on his fellow-men : I am rational, 
and those are also rational who are of my opinion; he 
who can not see that, is irrational, a blockhead. 

To many the words of Fr. Paulsen, '*I am inwardly 
bound only by my reason and my conscience, not by any 
human court exterior to me; this is the Magna Charta 
of Protestantism" (Philosophia Militans), seem to be a 
great declaration of liberty. But even the heathen had 
reason and conscience; these are not a product of Prot- 
estantism. To imagine ourselves free, because we believe 
our reason alone, is a widespread but very great self- 
delusion; for to consider ourselves bound by our reason 
alone, and by no other human court exterior to us, is to 
believe in our own infallibility, and in ours alone. Then 
the Catholic believing in the infallibility of the Church 
and the pope, is more modest. 

Worshipers of reason must admit that reason is not 
even able to comprehend the material world surrounding 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 23 

us. This is true of the simple question, Is this world 
finite or infinite? If it is infinite, it is too large for me, 
utterly incomprehensible and inconceivable; reason halts 
and leaves me in the lurch. If it is finite, it is too small 
for reason, leaving it unsatisfied and incredulous and ask- 
ing, What is there beyond the limits of the world ? Thus 
in the concepts of time and space reason wavers between 
the finite, which is too small, and the infinite, which is 
too large for it. It can not even master matter ; and the 
atom, this postulate of chemistry, without which it can 
not reason farther, is an unreasonable and absurd idea. 
An indivisible quantity ! An absolute unity, and yet dif- 
ferent from another unity by virtue of all kinds of at- 
tributes ! And these two absolutely unchangeable unities 
are said to "unite;" or by mere mutual approach and by 
revolving around one another, they are said to produce 
the infinite variety of forms in this world. But is all 
differentiation in matter due merely to motion? And 
how about ether, that more and more indispensable hy- 
pothesis of physics, the "eternal receiver and transmitter 
of force?" Now it is said to act "as an entirely unelastic 
body," then again "as a gaseous fluid" (Helmholtz), and 
according to W. Thompson, now Lord Kelvin, "it con- 
sists of infinitely small eddies of a frictionless fluid." 
Riddle upon riddle! Matter and force, mysterious 
unities; insep^able, and yet not mutually transmutable ; 
the most indispensable of all the soul needs for revela- 
tion; commonplace things with which the babe plays, 
abysses of thought, mysteries that giddy the mightiest 
minds. 

Thus reason in its relation even to this w^orld is like 
a small child that tries in vain to grasp and lift with its 



24 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

little hands a hundred-pound cannon-ball. And the soul 
of man is inconsolable, and hopes and believes and doubts 
and despairs of his own ability, and sighs. Why have 
wings, if, like a captive eagle, I must strike against the 
bars of my prison and be hurled back bleeding, whenever 
I attempt to mount on high ? Indeed this is the irrational 
and absurd in life, this the unintelligible and astonishing 
and the torture of existence, that we will and can not ac- 
complish, that we desire and do not possess, that we 
strive and do not gain. Whence this unnatural contra- 
diction in man, since every other creature in this world 
wills only what it can accomplish? The Bible alone 
knows, and relates the fall of man. Whoever denies the 
fall of man, gives himself and mankind a clear testimonial 
of original indigence and impotence. 

The soul has indeed something in it that is capable 
of the divine, wherefore Tertullian could say, "The 
human soul, according to its innermost nature, is a Chris- 
tian." But this ability to know, or, at least, to feel the 
divine is not reason; it is the spirit, whose voice is con- 
science. A mother loves her child, perhaps her crippled, 
helpless, and useless child, not with her reason, but with 
her spirit. With his spirit man prefers struggles and 
difficulties and dangers to an easy life of mere pleasure, 
in order that he may attain to high ideals. Reason knows 
only selfishness ; therefore the Bible can sp^k of "enmity 
in the mind by evil works" {"hoese Werke der Ver- 
nunft"). 

Thus intellect, reason, intelligence do indeed aid us 
in utilizing the visible and corruptible for the practical 
purposes of our earthly existence, but they do not enter 
into the knowledge of the true and incorruptible content 



KNOWLEDGE AND EAITH. 25 

of things. How can they help us to know the invisible 
and eternal things of the Godhead? Reason can not 
solve for me the mysteries of eternity. Even the spirit 
of man can not get beyond anticipations and longings. 
All our knowledge is relative; but only absolute knowl- 
edge can satisfy the soul. 

Even the knowledge of infidelity is faith, resting on 
dogmas concerning existence, the forces of nature, matter, 
atoms, mechanics. It gathers, accumulates, and arranges 
facts, endeavors by means of ingenious hypotheses and 
speculations to give its view of the world a certain value; 
but the latter always remains a question without an an- 
swer, a circle without a center; for God is wanting, the 
great undemonstrable primitive Ego and the Cause of all 
causes, the Source of all personality, undemonstrable and 
indispensable, invisible, omnipresent, whom man inces- 
santly and vainly endeavors to comprehend or to deny — 
proof positive, that He exists. 

Every one, whether he be Christian or not, lives in 
faith and by faith. Every one consciously or uncon- 
sciously finds his intellectual life-task in gathering evi- 
dence for his faith or his unbelief. 

But the faith of the unbelieving, which he proudly 
calls his knowledge, is impotent and unfruitful, never yet 
having produced anything great or beautiful or lively. 
It tears down, and does not build up ; it negates, and does 
not afiirm ; it takes, and does not give. It has no creative 
power. This is shown by the world's entire history. 

Unbelief has no answer to the great questions of man- 
kind. It is not able to quench our thirst for knowledge. 
It can tell us nothing concerning the final causes of things. 
Its science makes man more learned, but no wiser ; more 



26 THE BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD, 

ingenious and refined, but no better and wiser. Man la- 
ments his great need and his fear of death, his doubts 
and his despair, and inquires how he may escape hell; 
unbelieving science answers with a new molecular theory, 
or with a recipe for the breeding of bacilli. 

Despite its pride, this unbelief in the garb of science 
is, more closely examined, a poor wretch that moves to 
pity rather than to fear. Instead of standing in its pres- 
ence with downcast eyes, look it sharp in the eye, and you 
will presently be aware of its uncertainty. Instead of 
being afraid of its cheap wit and mockery, or being con- 
founded by such pet terms as progress, enlightenment, 
light of free research, turn the tables on it, and ask it 
what it knows, what it believes, what it hopes, what its 
view of the world is ; and you will soon observe, probably 
with surprise, that even scientific unbelief knows nothing. 

Itself and the world remain unsolvable riddles, things 
the purpose of which it does not know. Even Schleiden, 
otherwise idealistic, writes : "The entire universe is a 
machine, a wheelwork of atoms. Our knowledge fails 
us, whenever the attempt is made to explain the real 
essence of force and matter mechanically, and to trace 
them back to a necessity." (Das Meer.) Is that not a 
confession of ignorance as to whence this machine comes, 
why, how, and to what end it works ? Dudley says, "Our 
life consists, for the most part, of things we do not pos- 
sess;" even so science consists, for the most part, of 
things we do not know. 

Thus unbelief does not weary in lauding progress, 
whilst it teaches that the universe and all it contains will 
some day be wrapped in eternal night. . He who shrugs 
his shoulder at Christian dogmas, posits undemonstrable 



KNOWLEDGE AND EAITH, 27 

dogmas concerning the non-existence of God, concerning 
eternal matter and force; or maintains with L. Buechner 
that the eternity of matter has been proven by experiment. 
He derides miracles, and believes in the autogenesis of 
the world. He mocks at divine creation, and speaks of 
unconscious matter which produced consciousness, of a 
primal cell that created itself. He denies the soul of man, 
and believes in the soul of the atom, or in the unconscious 
memory of the molecule. He teaches that matter is eter- 
nal, and denies the existence of time in itself; accepts 
the doctrine of the eternity of the universe, and also the 
contradictory doctrine of an evolution, but just begun. 
He maintains a former autogenesis of life, and denies 
the possibility of primal generation. He demands high- 
est reverence for science, and contends that there is no 
such thing as absolute truth. He proclaims the logical 
necessity and teleology of all being, and at the same time 
the insipidness of religions. He believes in the all-right- 
eousness of eternal matter, and yet denies future retribu- 
tion. He teaches — as do also would-be tragedians, Ibsen, 
Sudermann, Hauptmann — a moral order of the world 
without an eternal and just Orderer of the world, guilt 
without God, and atonement without immortality. His 
view of the world is a jumble of suppositions and contra- 
dictions. No wonder, since his gods are deaf-mute, un- 
conscious matter, and blind, foolish chance. And finally 
he asks with Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and others, 
whether time and space, matter and force, are not mere 
concepts of his own brain. Doubting all, and despairing, 
he seizes his own head, asking, "Am I indeed who I am?'* 
and feels the foundations tottering under him. 

No less worthless is the entire modern view the 



28 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

masses have of the world. Without proving, they drift 
with- the tide; are the toy of the spirit of the age; a 
feather incessantly wafted hither and thither by militant 
"spirits in heavenly places," and their master "the prince 
of darkness." They adopt convenient formulas of 
thoughtlessness, and think they have proved their point, 
if they repeatedly assert, "Science has long since done 
away with such superstition!" "No one believes that 
now !" "Every one knows now !" 

But as a rule every one knows nothing. "Every one" 
at one time attended a school, and there, willingly or un- 
willingly, had a smattering of all kinds of knowledge im- 
parted to him ; he then served as apprentice, or went out 
into the world; now he is a more or less successful busi- 
ness man, a good citizen, and a solicitous father, who 
meditates day and night how he may be able to provide 
for himself and his family. Moreover he discusses poli- 
tics at the beer-table, is liberal or conservative, a demo- 
crat or a socialist, and takes his knowledge of God and 
the world from the daily papers, his higher education 
from romances, theatrical plays, and illustrated period- 
icals. At the same time "every one" believes practically 
nothing, and knows practically nothing, but parrots cer- 
tain phrases in keeping with the times, as, "We are liv- 
ing in the twentieth century!" "Enlightenment has done 
away with belief in miracles and other nonsense taught 
by the parsons !" "We are in the sign Progress !" But 
if we lay hold on him intellectually, and demand that he 
give an account of his view of God and the world, he is 
presently in great straits, becomes incensed, or excuses 
himself, saying, "I am not well versed in the matter; my 
calling, my vocation demands all my time!" In plain 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 29 

English : "I have never, not even for an hour, meditated 
on God and the world, nor on whence I came, whither I 
go, and what I am." His bold appearance, notwithstand- 
ing, "every one" is usually a coward. iVnd the more en- 
lightened, the greater coward ! With fear of bacilli-con- 
tagion or blood-poisoning, he can be chased through the 
eye of a needle. For though he does not fear God, he 
fears everything else. And in opposition to the word of 
Christ, "Take no thought for your life," he, in his pru- 
dence, teaches that it is the duty of man to live in con- 
stant anxiety and care concerning his existence and that 
of his family. And if misfortune overtakes him, if his 
life is imperiled by land or by sea, if fire or pestilence or 
earthquake menace him, he is beside himself with fear; 
and if he loses his loved ones, his money or his home, his 
honor or his health, there is an end of his enlightenment ; 
he is a broken man, takes to strong drink as a comforter, 
becomes nervously and mentally deranged, or shoots him- 
self, according to well-known examples of the modern 
stage. His life is a chain of inconsistencies. He halts 
between modern enlightenment and ecclesiastic forms that 
have been handed down, and that he has not the courage 
to throw overboard ; he believes neither in Christ nor in 
the Gospels, but in case of official information, calls him- 
self a Christian "of evangelical faith," and has his chil- 
dren baptized and make confirmation vows upon a con- 
fession of faith in which he does not believe. At the 
grave of a fellow club-member he can speak eloquently of 
a "better beyond" and of "meeting again," and yet he is 
terribly afraid of death. He extols free thought, and 
bows anxiously to every pet phrase, every new intellectual 
style, to the customs of society, and to public opinion. 



30 THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD. 

He lauds simplicity, and loves pomp; praises contented- 
ness, and can not treasure up money enough; estimates 
humility highly in others, and ever desires to be praised. 
He is constantly talking of character and culture, and 
chases after any news or reading matter, be it never so 
insipid, and after any pastime, be it never so silly, in order 
to fill up the void in his enlightened soul. His life is an 
everlasting contradiction ; in fact, a continuous lie. And 
deep down his poor soul sighs, ever and ever feels its 
poverty and nakedness, and yet wishes to die happy when 
the end comes. 

To appease such wavering people, and the many who 
in our day want to break neither with God nor with the 
world, an equally undecided tendency holds that faith and 
knowledge are to be separated entirely. Thus a Genevan 
professor said before young men's associations: "Faith 
is not a matter of intelligence. It pertains only to the 
absolute and not to phenomena, and in itself conditions no 
assertion concerning the universe" — a statement contra- 
dicted by the first verse of the Bible : *'In the beginning 
God created the heaven and the earth." 

Since the soul is a unity, it is folly to assert that two 
manifestations, two forces of the soul have nothing in 
common. It might just as well be claimed that man's 
volition has nothing to do with his love. Just as man 
loves what he wills, and wills what he loves, he knows 
what he believes, and believes what he knows. We saw 
that man must, above all things, believe that he exists, and 
that he exists as be, who he is. And to demand that a 
Christian's faith have nothing in common with his knowl- 
edge, that his conception of creation have nothing in 
common with his conception of the Creator, is to demand 



KNOWLBDGB AND FAITH, 3i 

that he divide his soul into two mutually independent 
halves ; that he live in two mutually contradictory worlds 
at the same time, and have a distinct God for each of 
them — the God of nature, and the God of the Christian. 
How absurd ! How now ? shall I — as many, alas, do, but 
pay the price of confusedness or unclearness and impo- 
tency of their entire soul-life — on Sundays believe in and 
pray to God who, as a pitying Father, hears and answers 
every sigh of my soul and knows its every need, and dur- 
ing the week believe only in a God of reason, the Origin- 
ator of the eternal laws of nature, who, bound by these, 
can make no alterations concerning them, and must let 
the world run its course? Or shall I, standing by the 
grave of my loved ones, allow myself to be comforted 
by the pastor with the hope of a blessed eternity, in which, 
together with my departed loved ones, I shall praise God 
in eternal light, and He shall wipe away all tears from my 
eyes, and, having returned home, be instructed by my 
"Gartenlaube," or similar periodicals, that science, that 
astronomy, had done away with the heaven of the Bible? 
To demand two distinct views of the world in one and 
the same soul, is to offend sound common sense. 

True, Christian belief really has to do with the uncon- 
ditioned and the eternal. And because this, revealed to 
man by God's Word and Spirit, is infinitely higher than 
the conditioned and transitory, faith can dispense with 
the study of phenomena. Thousands of Christians have 
never studied sciences ; and the thief on the cross had no 
need of them to enter Paradise. But if the educated 
Christian of to-day studies sciences in order to broaden 
his conception of the world, it is sound and correct phi- 
losophy to deduce his explanation of facts, which always 



32 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

remains personal, from his ideas of the unconditioned, 
and to view this world in the light of eternity. Indeed, 
all phenomena and ideas will have value for him only in- 
asmuch as their content is divine; and science without 
faith will to him be a mere nomenclature, a dictionary, 
wanting the spirit of language. 

The demand to keep faith and knowledge entirely 
separate is infeasible, because it is impossible to deter- 
mine where faith begins and knowledge ends. We have 
seen that all science exercises faith. True, science has 
ever claimed to *'know." Thus in the days of Ptolemy 
it "knew" that planets move in epicycles; in the Middle 
Ages it *'knew" that there is a "phlogiston," a fiery ele- 
ment ; a century ago it "knew" that, according to physical 
laws, submarine life is impossible at a depth of three hun- 
dred meters. On the other hand, science scoffed at manv 
things that now are reckoned among its proud 
"triumphs;" and even in the past century it would have 
treated with contempt the poor fellow who would have 
dared to assert the possibility of seeing through metal 
plates a centimeter thick, or of moving heavy wagons up 
hill by mere contact with a copper wire, or of conversing 
across the ocean without a material conductor. How 
clearly it would have proved that, according to the forces 
and laws of nature, such things were absurd and impos- 
sible! For our ideas of force, matter, and natural laws 
are constantly changing, and will continue to change. 
Not by chance, but ordained thus of God in the play of His 
wisdom with men, we, believing that we have thoroughly 
demonstrated a certain theory, "accidentally" discover (as 
in the case of the Roentgen rays) new facts which are not 
covered by this theory, or which contradict it, and which 



KNOWLEDGB AND FAITH, 33 

lay before us ten new questions for every one we believe 
to have solved, and cry aloud, You will never fully fathom 
even a single phenomenon of divine creation ! Thus we 
had discarded the theory of emanation of light, and had 
accepted the wave theory. Now we have Roentgen rays, 
an invisible light that photographs through opaque 
bodies; cathode rays, of which Dr. P. Koethner writes: 
"It is indeed Newton's theory of emanation, long ago dis- 
carded, that at once solves the problem of cathode rays." 
We now have Becquerel rays, which, proceeding from 
harmless materials, cause burns, even through clothes and 
without harming them, that are hard to heal; and we 
know matter to be "radio-active." We know, or believe, 
that atoms incessantly and with the velocity of light 
throw off millions of "electrons." (Of the size of these 
electrons W. Kaufmann says in " Naturwissenschaftliche 
Rundschau/' that they are to bacilli as a bacillus is to the 
earth!) We are amazed to see one "chemical element 
generate another new element out of itself." The atom 
is no longer the smallest, unalterable, immutable particle 
of matter. In a million years we would have a different 
chemistry, new elements, a new world! {Zeitschrift fuer 
angewandte Chemie, November 1902.) The law of the 
conservation of energy is wavering, and even now Pro- 
fessor Dr. Dreher is right, when he says : "The newest 
experiments and discoveries are shaking the very founda- 
tions of our knowledge, which we thought we had laid for 
eternities, and threaten to overthrow our entire system 
of ^immutable natural laws.' " 

How soon materialism, which but fifty years ago 
boasted so loudly, has grown silent ! When alcohol, mad- 
der lake, i. e,, organic matter, were successfully gained 
3 



34 THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD. 

from inorganic matter, materialism exclaimed rejoic- 
ingly: Nothing but physical and chemical processes! 
We no longer need an antiquated "vital force." And to- 
day the foremost physiologists and scientists unanimously 
declare that mechanical, chemical, and physical processes 
are not at all sufficient to explain the phenomena of life, 
and vital force is again reinstated as mysterious "vital- 
ism." 

Thus present scientific faith is tottering, and we must 
believe something new. In the coming century science 
will believe that it knows other things to an absolute cer- 
tainty, and will burn up what it now worships, and wor- 
ship what it now burns up. Mankind is not only inces- 
santly building at the temple of knowledge, but just as 
incessantly also tearing down, often a wing still new, or 
an addition hardly completed. And the sum total of 
human knowledge remains to the angels "of great power" 
the constant, ofttimes childish, belief and surmise of 
creatures who can not say of a single atom of creation, 
of a single letter of the great Divine Book, "I understand 
it, I have mastered it !" 

Even the old sages, such as Pythagoras, Plato, Soc- 
rates, whose inner life was so harmonious, demanded of 
philosophers a thoroughly consistent union of faith, 
knowledge, and conduct. This, to them, was the height 
of human wisdom, and they would have noted with 
amazement and due contempt the present notion of a 
separation of faith and knowledge. How much more 
ought the Christian who believes in the "one God," ear- 
nestly endeavor to blend faith and knowledge most inti- 
mately in his view of the world. For creation and the 
Creator do not contradict each other. Creation is the 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 35 

realization of the thoughts of a holy and righteous God. 
Why shall I separate the Master and His work, and sever 
cosmic phenomena from their cause, the spirit? Among 
the millions of facts that the study of nature and the 
knowledge of the world's history offer, there is not one 
that contradicts the Bible. Contradictions arise from 
erroneous views of Scripture entertained by unbelievers 
or by biased and undiscerning believers. We do not deny 
that Christians differ in their views concerning nature 
and its relation to the Scriptures. If among unbelieving 
scientists scarcely two can be found whose views of na- 
ture are wholly alike, why should freedom of opinion be 
utterly denied us? In Christianity there are also grades 
of knowledge, and there is individual viewing of facts, 
as may be seen in Newton and Leibnitz. But when in 
conventions of scientists, as it occurred in Munich, "the 
dark forces that oppose free research" are raved against 
with great pathos, we ask : What Christian raises objec- 
tions to researches in deep seas, to new theories in chem- 
istry, or to the discovery of new double stars or new 
species of plants or animals? On the contrary, he re- 
joices when the wonderful things in his Father's crea- 
tion are more and more unveiled. With what enthusiasm 
Linne, Cuvier, Herschel, Maedler, Liebig, and others 
praised them ! 

Entirely in the sense of modern enlightenment. Pro- 
fessor Harnack considers faith and knowledge opposed to 
each other, when, writing against the appointment of the 
Catholic Dr. Spahn to succeed Professor Mommsen, as 
professor of history, he expressed the hope, that "the gov- 
ernment would be strengthened in its attitude to guard 
the sanctuary of science against the disturbing encroach- 



3 6 THE BIB LB THE WORD OE GOD. 

ments of confessionalism and related powers." Sanc- 
tuary of science, — a striking phrase for the intellectually 
immature ! We fail to discover anything sacred either in 
the breeding of bacilli, or in the exploration of southern 
seas, or in the psychology of Lombroso or the physiology 
of Virchow, or in the philosophy of Schopenhauer or Ed. 
V. Hartmann, or in the historic hypotheses of Wellhausen, 
or in the materialistic-atheistic doctrines of Haeckel. Or 
shall we speak of a sanctuary of botany, of national 
economy, and of metallurgy? Only that is sacred which 
is true, which pertains to God; and more sensible, espe- 
cially for a theologian, than the hope entertained by 
Professor Harnack, would be the wish, that a professedly 
Christian government might protect the sanctuary of our 
confession against the attacks of a blasphemous tendency 
in science. 

Confessionalism is derived from confessio (confes- 
sion, avowal, acknowledgment), and it is strange, to say 
the least, that a theologian should consider the confession 
of religious faith an enemy to be combated by science. 
If Professor Harnack's ^'Essence of Christianity" is not 
a confession of his belief or unbelief, it is worthless. We 
and others have thus far reckoned it and other produc- 
tions of modern theology among the manifestations of 
confessionalism. That Christianity equals "confession," 
''confessionalism," appears from the w^ords of Christ: 
"Whosoever shall confess me," . . . "whosoever 
shall deny me;" likewise from the words of Paul: "If 
thou confess" . . . "and believe." There is a re- 
ligion, a cult, and a priesthood of unbelief and enlight- 
enment, as well as of faith and Christianity; there is con- 
fession, therefore confessionalism, in negative criticism, 



I 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH, 37 

materialism, and atheism, and it is being proclaimed 
aloud in many colleges and universities, without being 
objected to in the name of "free science." In its true 
sense, confession includes every word pertaining to good 
and evil by which a man, consciously or unconsciously, 
expresses his attitude to both. This attitude controls his 
life and his actions. There is no more a science without 
confessions than a science without postulates; moreover 
such a science would be an insipid morsel. Only the su- 
perficial or ignorant can believe that science and scholars 
are above belief and unbelief. A man either believes or 
does not believe in God. For him who believes, God is 
the all-animating central idea of science, and of his entire 
view of the world. Likewise the unbelief of him who 
denies God is the motive power of his intellectual ac- 
tivity, as may be seen in Haeckel's "Weltraetsel/' in 
Buechner's ''Kraft und Stoiff' in the works of Dodel, in 
Ed. V. Hartmann's ''Die Philosophic des Unhewussten/' 
etc. It is not scientific knowledge that begets belief or 
(as many Christians suppose) unbelief, else like knowl- 
edge concerning nature would of necessity produce alike 
either believing or unbelieving scientists. On the con- 
trary, belief and unbelief influence knowledge and its use, 
as may daily be seen in those who set forth their godless- 
ness as "unbiasedness," and then write books from which 
fumes of soured hatred of God issue forth. That con- 
fessionalism, whether it be of belief or of unbelief, is 
more hidden and veiled in other scientific works, will not 
prevent the intelligent reader from discerning of what 
spirit the book savors, and whether its author avows the 
great yea, or the great nay. 

The conflict between faith and knowledge arises from 



38 THE BIBLH THE WORD OE GOD. 

a lack of clear thinking, which makes many incapable 
of distinguishing between the absolute and the relative, 
between the immutable and the variable, between cause 
and effect. The world and existence consist of the abso- 
lute and the relative ; of the eternal and the temporal ; of 
ideas and phenomena; of that which exists in and of it- 
self, and that which exists by virtue of its relations to 
other things — as man consists of the immortal soul and 
the mortal body. 

The absolute belongs to God; the relative to man. 
But since the soul is the imperishable breath of Deity, 
man lives and moves both in the absolute and the rela- 
tive, and his intellectual life also comprises both. The 
universe is a product of the absolute and the relative 
most intimately intermingled. Our entire relative knowl- 
edge eventually rests on something undemonstrably ab- 
solute, as e. g., the existence of good and evil; that the 
good must be done, evil must be shunned; and that the 
entire system of mathematics, after all, is founded on 
the equations, i=i, 1+1=2. 

The absolute gives value and content to the relative; 
this is true of all human action, of love and hatred, of 
art and religion. The absolute in man constitutes his in- 
dividuality. The French, ''II faut etre quelqu 'un," 
means, Man must have or contain something absolute. 
The more insignificant a man is, the less important in 
his estimation is the absolute, the more important the 
relative. He does not speak of things or of causes, but 
always of transient phenomena ; not of the essence, but of 
the form. He has in himself no criterion of truth, but 
judges of the latter in keeping with the spirit of his day, 
with prevailing views of the world, and with the daily 
press, he is the toy of winds and currents. 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 39 

There is no absolute content in evil ; hence its empti- 
ness and hollowness, its nullity despite its tempting out- 
ward appearance, its inability to nourish the soul. 
"Vice," George Sand bitterly admitted after ample ex- 
perience, "is more irksome than virtue;" and in the 
biography of a brilliant, celebrated artist and his beau- 
tiful, talented, and admired mistress, a Frenchman who 
knew them well, writes, "They dragged hither and 
thither their indolent, wearisome existence." 

The immediate knowledge of the absolute we call 
faith. Faith in the relative, gained by observation of 
the transitory, the world calls knowledge. 

Is it possible to know anything concerning the abso- 
lute? Our soul, indeed, is itself a part of the absolute; 
therefore the relative can never satisfy it. And yet, if it 
attempts to rise to eternal truth, it strikes the blue canopy 
of heaven and falls back faint. Why ? The question has 
ever been asked by' true philosophers; the Bible alone 
answers it. The soul, being divine, longs for God, its 
source, and can not rest, unless it rests in Him. But diso- 
bedience, through which, misled by Satan, it put itself in 
opposition to God, has broken, yea, has torn off, its wings, 
and now its longing is powerless. And even though God 
should stoop to the soul, it would no longer understand 
the language of the Absolute; it would see the writing, 
but would not b^ able to read it, unless together with the 
writing it also receive from above the key to the same, 
and its darkness be illuminated by the Spirit. 

We are in need of revelation. Without revelation 
there is no possibility of true, absolute knowledge. Ex- 
amining more closely, I see that all things tend toward 
the unit, and that numerous phenomena can be traced 



40 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

back to a few principles, or to a single principle, — many 
effects to one cause; all forces to one force; the plant 
world to the cell; crystals to three axes; mathematics to 
surfaces, lines, and points. Hence I receive the impres- 
sion that there is a cause of all causes, Avhich, since it in- 
cludes all known and unknown effects, is of overwhelm- 
ing power and greatness; i. e., the source of all life. 
Recognizing this, something in me rejoices and cries, 
God I And with joy I observe, in the history of the 
human race, that hundreds of peoples and millions of 
men who knew nothing of one another, were agreed in 
this : There is a God. And even though the thoughtless 
masses were content with several gods or chief causes, 
the wise and more thoughtful {e. g., in India and Egypt) 
always and everywhere recognized that the idea of a 
God excluded all plurality ; that there can be but one God. 
To those recognizing this, we now address ourselves. 

If there is a God, He is omnipotent. If He were not 
omnipotent, there would be something exterior to Him- 
self that could overpower Him, and therefore would be 
stronger, mightier than He. This mightier would then 
be the true God. God must be very wise. This is shown 
by His creation, and by the incomprehensible intelligence, 
the wonderful adaptation to ends, with which even in- 
sects and infusoria are constructed, and fulfill the con- 
ditions of their existence. God must be a God of love. 
The great amount of sorrow and suffering in the world 
notwithstanding its beauty, as well as the joy of being, 
la joie de vivre, in its various phases, with the pleasures 
of power, of knowledge, of light and life in us and about 
us, but above all, our joy in the good, shows that this 
God, this primal cause of all being, is a God of good and 



KNOWLEDGE AND EAITH. 41 

of life, therefore a God of love. This, too, the peoples 
of the earth have ever known or felt. 

A living God of love can not leave himself v^ithout 
a witness among His creatures. That He apparently 
frequently does it; that we are not constantly able and 
permitted to see the shining face of this primal sun, is 
one of the greatest mysteries of our present existence, 
and leads us at once to suspect that, in the creation of 
which we are a part, something is not as it ought to be. 
If we ask mankind, ask the nations, "Have you any 
knowledge of this God; has He never revealed Himself 
to you?" they answer, "Certainly!" and point to mani- 
fold revelations in the form of inspired oracles, answers 
to prayer, dreams, visions, etc. If w^e inquire after the 
attestation of these revelations, we find that, just as they 
treated of and recommended the good and the just, they 
were also, without exception, addressed to good and just 
persons ; whence we conclude that they were true revela- 
tions of a good and just God. And not only secular, 
but also Biblical history gives us knowledge of Melchize- 
dek, a priest of the Most High, of a just Job, of a Prophet 
Balaam, of wise men from the East, to whom the one 
true God had revealed Himself, we know not how. 

Then God gave His people the law, which was a 
revelation of spiritual laws contained in nature, but also 
of a propitiation for the sins of the whole world, of which 
no knowledge could have been gained by natural means ; 
and He gave them the sacrificial cult, as the prototype 
of the sacrificial death of Christ. Thereupon Christ, the 
Word of God, came, proclaimed the divine law in its 
highest and most complete form, and Himself fulfilled 
the same. 



42 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

But this revelation of the absolute, this encroachment 
of the eternal upon the temporal, now everywhere em- 
barrasses man; in the family, in marriage, in the State, 
in politics, in literature, in art. He hates the divine ele- 
ment in the absolute, and his characteristic is opposition 
to the law. He feels himself especially affronted by the 
law in religion, in dogmas, in firm precepts, with their 
inexorable consequences. True, religion on earth can not 
dispense with the relative; for it needs outward forms, 
as precious wine needs vessels. Such forms will never be 
absolutely true, neither our setting of truths, since lan- 
guage — and modern languages less than the ancient — 
contains no fully adequate expression for truth. For 
this reason we must strive after greater clearness, pre- 
cision, and simplicity in religion, and keep it as free as 
possible from modern adjuncts and influences. All rela- 
tive, up-to-date elements in religion tend to enfeeble it; 
they are secondary, are clay mixed with the iron. All 
attempts to modernize Christianity, to make it more con- 
formable to human wisdom, to make it more acceptable 
to reason, and to make its cast-iron dogmas easier for 
our characterless generation, are delusions and heresies; 
they are the product of our day, and will pass away with 
our day. The absolute must not accommodate itself to 
the relative, the eternal not to the temporal, the divine 
not to the human. Religion is revelation, not science; 
and its further development is conditioned by new reve- 
lations of God to man. Twice it made progress: when 
Jehovah gave the law from Sinai, and when He was 
manifest in the flesh, bringing good tidings that He would 
take away the sin of the world. The third stage of its 
development will be reached when He appears to judge 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 43 

the world, and to reveal His own. To expect a develop- 
ment of religion by men is vain, seeing that they have 
not even been able to effect a development in philosophy, 
which is on a much lower plane, and largely recur to the 
mechanical atomic system of Democritus. 

The many in Europe, who agree with Archbishop 
Ireland that "the knowledge of the content of the Gospel 
must, by earnest endeavor and investigation, be shaped 
anew for each new age, in accordance with the limitation 
of progressive development attaching to all human 
knowledge,"* greatly mistake the immutable and eternal 
in man. In the first place, true Christianity is not human 
knowledge, and is not subject to its limitations; it is par- 
ticipation in divine knowledge through the mediation of 
the Holy Ghost. In the second place, the truths of the 
Bible are absolute truths that have no more to do with 
the development of mankind than mathematical axioms. 
The Bible says all men are sinners. Are we less sinful 
now than men formerly were? Or does the highly civ- 
ilized sin in a manner differing from that of the former 
savage? To this sin the Scriptures ascribe death and all 
the sorrow of the world. Do we no longer die ? Do our 
tears or our pangs of conscience differ from those of the 
ancients? Of this sin the Word of God says that it is 
the transgression of the holy law of a holy God. Is it 
anything else in our day? And the Word proclaims the 
glad tidings that God Himself pays the debt and gives 
us eternal life and blessedness. Are we no longer in 
need of such comfort in the twentieth century ? Indeed ! 
This Gospel is just as complete and absolutely true to- 
day as it was one thousand or two thousand years ago. 

♦ Translated from the German rendering of the original. 



^44 THB BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD, 



It applies alike to the civilized German or Englishman 
and the Chinese or Fiji Islander, and it must be accepted 
and believed in the same way by all men at all times. 
True, every man must, ''through earnest endeavor and 
investigation," appropriate Christian truths to himself, 
just as every child must for itself acquire a knowledge 
of the material world with its forms and colors, and also 
of the alphabet or the multiplication table. But each age 
can no more fashion anew the eternal truths of the Gos- 
pel, or appropriate them to itself in a new, thus far en- 
tirely unknown manner, than a child can invent new let- 
ters and figures, or another system of geometry than that 
of the point, the line, and the plane. The oldest skulls — 
e. g.j those of Cro-magnon, and the celt-skulls of Hall- 
stedt — have as large a brain cavity as those of present- 
day inhabitants of Berlin or Paris, if not larger; not a 
single quality, not a single power, not a single need either 
of body or soul has changed for six thousand years ; for in 
this respect, too, man is created in the image of God, 
that he is and remains the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever. Just as water still boils at ioo° C. (212° F.) 
and freezes at 0° C. (32° F.), so our love still kindles and 
our wrath still glows, or our hatred still freezes, at the 
same psychic temperature; our hopes and fears, our 
doubts and despair, and all our thoughts arise and are 
active through the same mysterious psychic processes, 
and according to the same psychic logic, as four thousand 
years ago. Any one can notice this in reading the prov- 
erbs of Confucius, the Icelandic Edda, Sakuntala, or 
one of Plato's Dialogues. What arrogance for any man 
to presume that he can formulate divine truths, of which 
he himself knows and can know nothing, better than 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 45 

Christ and His divinely inspired apostles formulated 
them! As well presume to be able to formulate anew 
and more wisely the sentence, two times two is four. 
What ! shall our success in inventing such trifles as elec- 
tric railways, telephones, wireless telegraphy, kodaks, 
and what not, allure us into the arrogance of wanting to 
invent new and fitter forms for the message of salvation 
that God sent us, than those He Himself gave? 

Whither the recommended endeavor to find "modern 
forms and modern phraseology for old truths" leads, we 
see daily, e. g., when a Christian author, positive in other 
respects, finds "something incomplete for our age" and 
"inadequate to the present German sensibilities" in the 
Father-name of God; when the words "prayer" and "to 
pray" "have come to have an unpleasant formal mean- 
ing," and "to repent" has become "utterly unintelligible" 
to him. Others look at faith as "fidelity to one's guid- 
ing ideal," and at revelation as "inward, comparative ex- 
perience." Christ is no longer, as the Word of the Spirit 
sublimely calls Him, "the Lamb of God, that taketh away 
the sin of the world," "the only begotten of the Father, 
full of grace and truth," but "the holy energy of love," 
and "a religious giant of the first rank." John's power- 
ful "The Word was made flesh" is rendered in a free 
translation, "The Idea was made Nature." "The Logos" 
is "the world-thought, which in intuitive and philosophic 
knowledge is united with our spirit," — and many more 
equally far-fetched, confused phrases and paltry, dishon- 
est attempts to disguise and conceal divine truth, in order 
to make the foolishness of the cross acceptable to the 
world and its wisdom. If the gentlemen have nothing 
better, we prefer to abide by "old things." Equally un- 



4^ THE BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

satisfactory are the modern theories of those who accept 
no legal ideas in the atonement between God and man, 
but only moral ideas, and hold an "ethical doctrine of 
atonement, instead of the juridical." ''Christ," they say, 
"guarantees to man God's pardoning love, and to God 
the repentance of estranged mankind." How does He 
do this, and in what respect is guilt thereby blotted out? 
How do I know that He guarantees God's pardoning 
love? And why is repentance, guaranteed by Christ, 
never realized among by far the greater part of human- 
ity ? And still the great question is not answered : Why 
must this surety and mediator between God and man die 
innocently on the cross ? 

Amazed, and not without pity, a Christian hears even 
godly men say, "Naturally the faith of to-day can not 
be the childlike faith of our ancestors." Why not? The 
world and mankind do not seem to me to be different from 
what they were of old. In front of my window tall 
birches are growing, as they grew four thousand years 
ago ; a chaffinch is sitting there and singing his song, as 
chaffinches have always sung ; little white clouds are pass- 
ing across the blue sky, as they have done since creation ; 
and my little boy is gleefully smiling at his mother, as 
children have always done, obeys me unconditionally, 
and believes what I say. And we should no longer be 
able to exercise childlike trust and faith toward Him, "of 
whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named?" 
Why not ? Because we have looked about us a bit in His 
creation, and our scholars confess that atoms and suns 
and life are constantly growing more mysterious, more 
inexplicable and incomprehensible to them, surpassing all 
their power of conception ? If we can no longer exercise 



KNOWLEDGE AND FAITH. 47 

childlike faith in our Father, we are misbehaved children, 
and, besides, are proud and narrow-minded; for a mod- 
est and intelligent mind otherwise comprehends that the 
father knows more than the child, the Creator more 
than the creature, God more than man. 

A certain periodical, nominally contending for true 
religion, exclaims : "That *naive faith' is unredeemably 
destroyed, we all know ; there are no ^believers' any more, 
in that sense of the term." What great things unbelief 
can naively imagine ! It is full of boastings, takes itself 
and a few thousand associates, ready with tongue and 
pen, to be the whole of mankind, and never dreams that 
there are seventy times seven thousand, and more, in the 
Fatherland, who still exercise naive and childlike faith, 
to say nothing of the millions from pole to pole, who do 
not know, and do not care to know, anything of its 
wisdom. 

"True genius," says Schiller, "must be naive, or it 
is not true genius." Just so true faith must be naive, or 
it is not true faith. But, thanks be to God, there are still 
many believers in this sense of the term! Daily, not 
only many dear little children and poor widows, pious 
young men and v/omen, many bodily and intellectually 
poor people, many people hungering and thirsting after 
righteousness, whom the world does not know, but also 
educated and experienced men who, having remained 
steadfast in trials and tribulations, "have received the 
spirit of adoption," die holding fast in naive faith to the 
saving Word which the wise by reason do not grasp. 
For high and firm, a rock amid the surging tides of an 
ignorant spirit of the world and the age ( Welt und Zeit- 
geist) , stands the sublime word of Him who is the truth : 



48 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

"Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the 
kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter 
therein." (Mark x, 15.) 

But the modern whirl of industry and commerce, dis- 
coveries in the physical world and the world of machin- 
ery, have so turned the heads of many that they are no 
longer able to think calmly, clearly, and consistently; 
that they no longer distinguish between that which is 
eternal and immutable, and that which is continually 
changing and passing away; that they have no firm ful- 
crum, from which they can move the world. They be- 
lieve everything and nothing, vacillate between truth and 
falsehood, and eagerly snatch at new and "modern 
forms." Whither these attempts lead, the various modern 
caricatures of the essence of Christianity show. 

Those who in our day maintain that Christianity 
must adopt new methods, "in order to remain in touch 
with the masses," show that they may understand some- 
thing of the world, but nothing of Christianity. There 
is only one "touch" possible between Christianity and 
the world, this child of falsehood whose God is Satan (2 
Cor. iv, 4), namely, that Christianity condemn this 
world with its lust, its glory, and its conduct. Concern- 
ing this world Christ says to his own : "Because ye are 
not of the world, therefore the world hateth you." "They 
shall put you out of the synagogues." "In the world 
ye shall have tribulation" — not success through touch 
with the up-to-date — "but be of good cheer ; / have over- 
come the world." 

If it is true that our knowledge, after all, is faith, 
it is also true that our faith is knowledge. I not only 
believe that prayer is followed by peace and comfort, 



KNOWLBDGB AND FAITH. 49 

and that God will answer, if the prayer be in accord 
with his love; I know and experience it as surely as I 
know and experience that bread nourishes me, and water 
quenches my thirst. I not only believe that the infidel 
is unhappy and without peace, even amid riches and 
pleasures; I see it in his actions, and hear it in his con- 
versation. We have not read in vain the confession of 
Rothschild and that of Vanderbilt, the poor, unhappy 
two hundred fold millionaire, and many others like them. 
Neither do I need to believe that sin is a reproach to any 
people; that pride goeth before destruction; that treas- 
ures of wickedness profit nothing; that hatred and envy 
are detrimental to health, love and kindness healthful; 
that the blessing of God is all-important; in short, that 
the entire Biblical order of the world is true. These 
are historic facts, occurring according to divine laws as 
eternal as the law^s of light and heat. Faith, hope, and 
love are forces as demonstrable as the force of gravita- 
tion or of electricity^ and they follow certain laws, and 
produce certain effects. This is shown by the martyrs 
and by the entire history of the world. Can nothing 
effect anything? 

That, as Schopenhauer himself admits, "the world's 
great guilt is the cause of its great sorrow;" tha't man 
can not find peace unless he find pardon ; that conversion 
creates a new man, changing the heart, making the proud 
humble, the miser liberal, the drunkard sober, the thief 
honest, the liar truthful; that true Christianity alone 
comforts man in life and in death, and grants the joy 
of eternity — that is not faith, that is knowledge; that is 
is anthropological, physiological, and psychological 
science. Indeed, this knowledge, as Culmann fittingly re- 
4 



50 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

marks, is more certain than any knowledge of nature 
about me, since it takes place in me; these facts of re- 
pentance, prayer, faith, and its effects, I can at all times 
empirically experience in my own inner life. I do not 
simply observe these processes, as I observe chemical 
and physical processes, of which I can know only the 
exterior; here I myself am the atom and the force, the 
active and the passive factor ; in short, I experience them 
and pass through them, and therefore I deduce from 
these the truth of the Bible and of the Christian view 
of the world with sounder logic than chemistry deduces 
its belief in the invisible atom from chemical combina- 
tions; deduce "the powers of the world to come" with 
greater certainty than physics deduces from its experi- 
ments the conviction that the forces of nature are un- 
changeable. 

Is it necessary for us to speak of the power of this 
true knowledge that is born of faith? The world's en- 
tire history reveals it. Wherever anything great and 
noble, anything true and beautiful, has been accomplished, 
it was accomplished through faith in a God, however im- 
perfectly he may have been known; through faith in 
eternal and unconditioned principles; in future retribu- 
tion, and in eternal life. This faith has founded cities 
and States, and given them just laws; likewise it has 
produced dramas and epic poems, as well as the fine arts 
based on forms and colors and tones and words. Unlike 
present-day art and enlightenment, no masterpiece of any 
kind has ever been produced that pertains to the earth 
alone. Its roots always extend into the nether world, 
and its crown is lifted into the world above. 

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews has, in the 
eleventh chapter, written grandly of the power of Chris- 



KNOWLEDGE AND EAITH. 5i 

tian faith. It is proper that he call attention to the 
steadfast suffering and death of so many martyrs as to 
the victory that overcometh the world. For "all that a 
man hath will he give for his life." Permit me to ex- 
amine you more closely, enlightened scoffer! Fancy 
candidly, that sentence had been passed on you, as it 
once was passed on the Camisard Ravanel and many 
others, that throughout the night you were to be sub- 
jected to the usual and unusual tortures. To-morrow 
your limbs were to be broken on the wheel, and you, still 
alive, to be thrown on a glowing pyre. Do you believe 
that, like those men, you could listen to the sentence with 
shining countenance, and even on the flaming pyre sing 
praises? Could you in exulting submission to the forces 
of nature die, joyfully praising your God, eternal matter? 
If not, then confess modestly : I do not know this faith, 
and have not e:?f perienced its power in me. But I see that 
it works great things — things impossible to my knowl- 
edge and my faith. 

But the Christian faith has the promise, not only of 
the life that now is, but also of that which is to come. 
That the Christian helps himself and others through this 
short life is a small matter to him. By faith he lays 
hold on eternal life. A blessed eternity in its full and 
true sense, with a "weight of glory," and an indescrib- 
ably high royal priesthood on the new earth, — that is the 
fulfillment and the reward of his faith. When he has 
finished the fight, his Lord and Master will stand at the 
threshold of the heavenly world and say, "As thou hast 
believed, so be it done unto thee !" "Enter thou into the 
joy of thy Lord !" 

Then knowledge and faith shall be done away, and 
eternal sight shall take their place. 



II. 
THE BIBLE. 

" The grass wither eth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but 
the word of the Lord endur eth forever.' _/ peter I, 24, 25. 

ThD Bible! Indeed, not an ordinary Book! Hated 
and hounded as no other book has ever been, and yet in- 
destructible ; despised, and yet honored; derided, and 
yet highly esteemed ; declared dead, and yet alive. Mighty 
emperors and kings and priests have shunned no toil 
and no guilt in order to exterminate it ; wise and scholarly 
men have, in the sweat of their brow, thoroughly refuted 
it; and now, that higher criticism lords over it and 
science has done away with it, it is spreading over the 
whole earth with astonishing rapidity in millions of 
copies and hundreds of languages, and is being read and 
preached from pole to pole; and, in the faith and power 
of the Word, Negroes submit to being burned alive, and 
Armenians and Chinese to being tortured to death. Ho, 
all ye scholars and critics ! do but write such a book, and 
we will believe you ! 

Complete in itself — "accursed any man that shall 
add unto or take away" — unchanged and unchangeable, 
this Bible stands for centuries, unconcerned about the 
praise and the reproach of men ; it does not accommodate 
itself to progress, does not recant a single word, remains 
grandly simple and divinely overpowering, and in its 
sight all men are equal and feel their impotency. 

52 



THE BIBLE, 53 

With sublime freedom it strides through the history 
of mankind, dismisses entire nations with a glance, with 
a word, in order to tarry a long time with the deeds of 
a shepherd; complacently it seven times repeats a list of 
gifts; records seemingly unimportant genealogies; sud- 
denly powers of the world to come flash from some word 
apparently casually dropped ; or thunders roll in the back- 
ground of the cool narration of some great crime. Now 
it speaks of God as playing with His creatures and de- 
lighting in the daring chamois, the snorting horse, and 
the beautiful lily; now it rises like an eagle to heights 
that make peoples, passing hither and thither, appear 
like swarms of grasshoppers, yea, all nations like a drop 
in a bucket. This word tells of a coat of many colors 
that a father made for his favorite son; and is silent 
concerning the life and efforts of Isaiah or John, and 
the martyrdom of Paul. It raises deepest questions, as 
if they were but trifles : "Where wast thou when I laid 
the foundations of the earth?" It condenses into a 
single word a sweeping view of the world : "The things 
which are seen are temporal; but the things which are 
not seen are eternal." It reveals vast counsels of the 
Lord, that he will make a new heaven and a new earth, 
where old things shall no longer rise in the hearts of men. 
What book is there written by man that does not grow 
trite from repeated readings? But of this Book thou- 
sands of the best and most talented among men have tes- 
tified, not only that they never tired of reading and study- 
ing it, but also that it constantly grew grander, richer, 
more unfathomable. How often some unseeming word, 
that you have read a hundred times, suddenly opens up, 
revealing its deep, hidden meaning! If every sentence. 



54 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

yea, every word in the Bible that has been important of 
beneficial to this soul or that were underscored, would a 
single one be found, that had been written uselessly and 
without purpose, or that had borne no fruit ? I think not. 

The Bible, the Word of God, reveals to us this in- 
visible God, whom mankind feels in, about, and above 
itself; in whom the child exultingly believes; whom the 
adult seeks and finds, loves, hates, worships, denies, to 
whom he prays and whom he curses; whom the dying 
aged hope to see, or concerning whom they try with 
quaking hearts to ease their minds, saying, There is no 
God! "In the beginning God created the heaven and 
the earth." The Bible does not deal with fools, whose 
heart's desire is, There is no God. It is not necessary 
to demonstrate God. Whoever is foolish enough to close 
his eyes and deny Him, may do so at his own risk; he 
will not harm Him, but himself. In the beginning of 
His Word, God steps forth out of His eternity, grand 
and resplendent, the ground, principle, and cause of the 
universe, the Creator of creation, He, who, in incom- 
prehensible omnipotence, creates, and there is no one 
who could say, Why doest thou thus? At the close of 
His Word, where a new eternal creation begins, heavenly 
creatures and powers cast their crowns at His feet, cry- 
ing: *'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and 
honor and power: for Thou hast created all things, and 
for Thy pleasure they are and were created." "Alleluia : 
for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth !" 

This God is called Jehovah (according to masoretic 
vocalization, e, o, a, which are also, according to Fr. v. 
Meyer, the vowels in "adonai" and "eloah"). He is 
called Eloah (the unlimited, the one to be feared) in his 



THB BIBLE. 55 

unity, and "Elohim" in His trinity. His trinity is ex- 
pressed in the third word, Gen. i, i : ^'Bereshith bara 
Elohim." "In the beginning the Blohim created" He 
is called "Ejeh asher ejeh," "I am that I am; the one 
existing from eternity, besides whom there is only a com- 
ing into existence through creation." He is called El- 
Shaddai, the Almighty; also, as old Jewish wisdom 
teaches, the All-sufficient, who creates all things accord- 
ing to measure and weight, and says, **It is enough." 
He is called El-Gibbor, mighty God ; and the expanse of 
the universe is "the expanse of His power." Me is 
called Jehovah Zeboath, the Lord of hosts; and all the 
heavenly hosts worship Him. He is called Jehovah Elo- 
him, when he rambles visibly in the garden, or descends 
upon Sinai. His name is Abba, dear Father, to those 
whom the Son has reconciled to Him. 

In mankind's conceptions of God, two tendencies 
have always opposed each other. The one held, and still 
holds, God to be an undefinable something, pure being 
without attributes, without diversity or differentiation. 
Looking at man in his poverty and wretchedness, they 
cry: "What manner of God would He be, who, like us, 
would be wafted hither and thither by hatred and love, 
wrath and mercy, by every gust of passions? What 
would become of the tranquillity of the Godhead ?" But 
whenever they attempt to think their God of pure being 
and without attributes, he dwindles down to pure noth- 
ing; and it is of no importance whatever for them, or 
for us, whether such a God exists or not, for he can avail 
us nothing. 

Others, feeling within themselves the grand, the sub- 



56 THE BIB LB THE WORD OP GOD. 

lime, and the divine, enthused by the idea of the beau- 
tiful, the true, and the good, and recognizing that there 
can be no concept without a medium, cast about for a 
God or for gods, plastic, living, ideals of human beauty, 
intelligence, power, and wisdom. Such were the Greeks 
and the Romans and poets everywhere, and even Schiller 
and Goethe felt themselves sympathetically drawn to 
these beautiful gods of Greece. The Bible combines 
the truth in these two views. Its God is the Incompre- 
hensible, the Eternal, "who dwelleth in the light which 
no man can approach unto ; whom no man hath seen, nor 
can see." Utterly unsearchable to the creature, He has 
nothing human in Him ; sufficient in Himself, He is not 
in need of creation. But out of Himself He begets the 
Logos, and thereby the Word; He thinks the great 
created One^ and in it the infinite series of numbers, the 
mathematics of the universe; and in this language, the 
revelation of His infinite names, and of all the possibili- 
ties of being. Now this Word, which is in God and is 
God in glory before the foundation of the world, speaks 
and commands ; and it stands fast. It speaks, and divine 
ideas become entities exterior to God, and still existing 
in and through Him alone. He creates man "in His 
image." Not in the sense that God has human attributes ; 
but that man, even fallen man, is an infinitely small copy 
of the divine attributes; that his love is a small drop, 
now impure, of the shoreless and bottomless love of God ; 
that his wrath is an image, now depraved, of holy justice, 
which Satan through his fall turned into divine wrath. 
Majestically this God Jehovah reveals Himself to man. 
He calls the stars by their names, and not one is wanting; 
He binds together Pleiades, leads the Bear and his chil- 



THE BIBLE. 57 

dren in the heavens, and looses the bands of Orion ; and 
the heavenly hosts worship Him. He makes clouds to 
be His mantle and a garment for the deep. He speaks, 
and there is light. He rides on the wings of the storm ; 
He touches the mountains, and they smoke ; He threatens 
the seas, and their waters retreat; He reveals to His own 
among men a glimmer of His glory, and they fall to 
the ground. He is God, before whose lightening coun- 
tenance the gods of the nations, Zeus, Osiris, and Odin, 
Baal, Astarte, and Moloch, affrighted, leave their thrones, 
and fade to misty phantoms, or shrivel up to hideous hob- 
goblins and gnashing, Satanic caricatures. 

But this terrible God, whose wrath is consuming fire, 
and before whose countenance, when He shall sit on His 
great white throne, the earth and the heavens shall flee 
away, is love. "The Lord is good to all, and His tender 
mercies are over all His works." "The eyes of all wait 
upon Thee, and Thou givest them their meat in due sea- 
son. Thou openest Thine hand and satisfiest the desire 
of every living thing." "O Thou that hearest prayer, 
unto Thee shall all flesh come." In infinite mercy He 
stoops to the miserable, to those who have a contrite 
spirit and tremble at His word, and says in tender love: 
"As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort 
you." "Can a woman forget her sucking child? Yea, 
they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." "Fear not, 
thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel ; I will help thee, 
saith the Lord." And as a bright morning star to the 
seaman in anxious night on stormy seas, so to poor man- 
kind in the nights and sufferings of human life is the 
bright word of promise : "There shall be no more death, 
neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any 



58 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

more pain ; and God shall wipe away all tears from their 
eyes. Behold, I make all things new !" 

Where among the gods of the nations is there a god 
like our God ? What have ye against Him, ye modern 
polytheists and idol worshipers, who consider yourselves 
far above the polytheism of the Babylonians, and yet 
yourselves worship various idols — science, reason, mam- 
mon, fame, honor, eternal matter, eternal nature — and 
serve with fear and trembling the blind forces of nature, 
ever uncertain whether they will not tear you to pieces, 
or devour you body and soul, as you yourselves say, by 
means of fire and water, storm and typhoon, volcanic 
eruptions, and earthquakes? And above these nether 
gods, ye daily worship also the highest and most stupid 
idol, chance, or else "good fortune!" Where does the 
old fellow sit? You claim our God has never yet helped 
us. We know better! But when have your gods ever 
heard and answered you? Call upon them, when even 
in life, but surely in death, all else fails you. The end 
of it all will be — and you yourselves say it, and antici- 
pate the "outer darkness" — that they leave you, their 
mankind, their creation, to perish helplessly in the icy 
coldness of eternal night. With your gods, your idol- 
ized reason, progress, and enlightenment, you will go to 
eternal ruin ; this you yourselves preach, and it is Biblical 
truth. 

Thus the Bible shows us a Deity transcending all 
human thought, and a revelation of this Deity that com- 
bines in itself all the beautiful, the lofty, the sublime, 
that can enter the mind of man. And the Son says, "I 
and My Father are one." 

True, when according to the eternal divine counsel 



THE BIBLE. 59 

this Son-God was made flesh, in order to save His fallen 
world, there was in His outward appearance "no form 
nor comeliness ; He was despised, and we esteemed Him 
not; and we hid as it were our faces from Him;" and 
even to-day this Man of sorrows and reproach is despised 
by those whose eyes are held, that they do not know Him. 
But Him also the Word of God shows us in His true 
form (Rev. i), shining as the sun. His eyes like flames 
of fire, the sight of whom the beloved disciple John, yet 
living in the flesh, could not endure. 

This God of the Bible is not only He by whom and 
for whom all things are created ; but also He by whom 
and for whom all things consist. "In Him we live and 
move and have our being." What keeps the universe 
from crumbling into dust and atoms? for they tell us 
that it once originated from atoms. What urges onward 
in its circuitous course the universe, "the one thing, that 
turns?" What chases millions of suns through endless 
ether in giddy flight? Whence come the floods of in- 
comprehensible forces which they are incessantly pouring 
into space, and which call forth unnumbered forms of 
life on their planets ? Scientists claim to have found out 
that these are all one single indestructible force, which 
is eternally changing into various forces. This the Bible 
knew long ago. It is the one force of the one mighty 
God, El Gibbor. It is this force that causes universes, 
as well as the atoms in the drop of water, to revolve 
about one another ; that animates the gnat and the whale 
(Psa. civ, 26-30) ; that causes the earth to tremble, and 
volcanoes to belch forth fire. "God quicken eth all 
things," not only animated nature (i Tim. vi, 13). The 
Bible knows nothing of natural forces, which, as some 



6o THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

admit, were once created by God, but now exist some- 
what independently, and drive the machinery of the uni- 
verse, just as steam and a fireman drive the locomotive, 
and could drive it awhile, even if the engineer stepped 
down. It knows no nature exterior to, and apart from, 
God, in which God is not. This view — entertained, alas ! 
by some Christians also — is wretched semi-materialism. 
The Bible teaches Christian pantheism, and not only 
says, "God shall be all in all," but also, ''In Him we live 
and move and have our being." One life alone — His life, 
animates all creatures, the lowest and the highest — men, 
angels, devils, crystals, plants, and animals. "If I make 
my bed in hell, behold. Thou art there." (Psa. cxxxix, 
8.) 

The world is a continual effect of God. God is not 
a man, whose work stands beside him as a dead thing. 
His work is quick, and its existence a continual originat- 
ing in the same power, in which it was created. As God 
daily creates many thousands of human souls, and every 
hour millions upon millions of life germs (for without 
Him even infusoria can not exist or multiply), so he 
effects in Christians the new birth and the inner life from 
God. "Without Me, ye can do nothing." "Out of the 
throne of God proceeds a pure river of water of life," 
and empties itself in the universe; and if this source 
should fail, the worlds would wither and dry up. But 
the Bible just as decidedly condemns heathen pantheism, 
which says, "The universe is God." Nay, in God and 
by His will every atom of creation exists ; but if He to- 
day should cease to will, and if the universe should van- 
ish again into the nothing from which God called it forth, 
God Himself would thereby have lost nothing. If the 



THB BIBLE, 6i 

nations, these millions of spirits on earth, "are as noth- 
ing, and less than nothing, before Him," how insignifi- 
cant must be this material world, as we call it! The 
Father and the Son, light of light, God of God, of one 
substance with the Father, with the Father in glory be- 
fore the foundation of the world, — they have no need of 
creation. 

The Bible further says that for such activity, for the 
administration of the affairs of His creation, and for 
the purpose of blessing them and Himself, this God of 
love created mighty angels, obedient servants, and makes 
them winds and flaming fire, in order to do his bidding. 
Here unbelief smiles, and thinks nothing really exists 
save what it can with difficulty discover with its dim- 
sighted eye, or by means of ground lenses. But all na- 
tions of the world have ever had an irresistible impression 
that beneath us, about us, and above us there are many 
and mighty spirits of good and evil; and we ask. Why 
should a Creator's omnipotence have stopped with man? 
Should he in his immeasurable creation not have known 
other and higher beings to create ? We see that, even on 
this little earth, the God of life has scattered, like sands 
of the seas, innumerable plants and animals and minutest 
organisms, but recently discovered; and should He have 
left between Himself and man, and on millions of other 
greater worlds, a deep gulf and abyss of nothing? No, 
in His inexhaustible creative power He has undoubtedly 
throughout the universe created millions of beings that 
we presurmise without knowing them, and innumerable 
angels, the hired servants in our Father's house (Luke 
XV, 17), distinct from the sons of God, who shouted for 
joy, when the foundations of the earth were laid, and 



62 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

who, ever and ever, present themselves before the Lord 
(Job i, 6; ii, i) ; then thrones, and principahties, and 
powers in heavenly places ; likewise "the hosts of heaven, 
that worship him," whom the Prophet Micah saw stand- 
ing at the right and the left of the throne ( i Kings xxii, 
19), and of whom some, given charge of invisible worlds, 
were not faithful, and are being judged. "And it shall 
come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall punish the 
host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of 
the earth upon the earth." (Isa. xxiv, 21.) But Christ 
has "reconciled all things unto himself, whether they be 
things in earth, or things in heaven." (Col. i, 20.) That 
is the great kingdom, unknown to us, that he went to 
receive for Himself (Luke xix, 12, 15), and to return 
again. And higher than all these are the seraphim and 
cherubim, these pillars of the throne of Jehovah, par- 
taking of His glory, their rings full of eyes, dreadful to 
behold, and incessantly flashing life into the universe. 
How many other creatures of God and revelations of His 
creative power we shall some day learn to know in the 
heavens of heavens ! 

Revelation shows that such angels of great power 
also control certain elements in the earth, and speaks of 
an angel of waters, of angels of the wind, of an angel 
who has dominion over fire. Of these nether gods, for 
the Bible calls them Elohim — "Worship Him, all ye 
gods" (Psa. xcvii, 7; cf. Heb. i, 6) — the ancients had 
some idea, when they made Pluto the god of fire, Nep- 
tune the god of water, and Zeus the god of the air (cf. 
Eph. ii, 2.) But as we, on account of our progress in com- 
merce and inventions, despise powerful civilizations that 
have passed away, so we are prone to undervalue also the 



THE BIBLE, 63 

great notions of divine truth at all times granted ear- 
nestly-inquiring persons among all peoples, even though 
cne god of this world understood well how to convert 
them into falsehool for the thoughtless masses. . 

Besides the great truth that everything lives, moves, 
and has its being in God, the Bible also clearly teaches 
that there is a god of evil. With this teaching it flashes 
light upon the entire unreasonableness of this world, a 
riddle otherwise unsolvable. A well-known philosopher 
exclaimed: "This world is the best possible, and the 
sum total of evil in this world is the least possible, and 
an absolute necessity." But in his heart of hearts no one 
believes it, and no doubt he himself did not. Every one 
wishes that things change for the better; therefore this 
world is not the best possible. In our day many say: 
"No, this world is evil, the arena of a cruel, merciless 
struggle for existence, in which rude force gets the upper 
hand." This, too, is not true. Despite all falsehood, 
despite all evil and a41 injustice, mankind is being ruled 
by laws of morality and a categoric imperative of right 
action, even though such laws be obnoxious to it ; and no 
nation has ever chosen a ruler, a judge, or a priest, and 
said to him, Oppress us, deal unjustly with us, proclaim 
falsehood unto us. Still others say with a cold smile: 
"Why all this strife? Everything is pure mechanism of 
atoms — a play of blind forces of nature! The world 
arose out of nothing ; it will sink back into nothing ; and 
what does it matter? There is neither sense nor purpose 
in the universe." But the heart within them gives them 
the lie, and something within man rebels, and cries out. 
It is not true ! It can not be true ! 



64 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

The Bible alone knows. It is not necessary here to 
speak more minutely of the revelation concerning the fall 
of Satan, the great struggle of the two principles, and 
God's final victory. This Satan you flowery speakers 
must take into account, who smilingly deny him, and 
thereby serve him. You can not tell us, whence the tor- 
tures of existence; why doubt and care and grief devour 
yoa, and why pain rages in your bones ; why man comes 
into, lives in, and leaves this world with sweating brow 
and tear-dimmed eye. With seeing eyes you could not 
help seeing, that we are slaves — whose? — in a bound and 
fettered world. Bondage, rigidity, apparent death, — 
that is the characteristic of creation at present; and life 
can struggle out of this deep lethargy only with unspeak- 
able difficulty. What is all our chemistry, but an attempt 
through vital warmth to liberate matter from its bondage, 
its rigid combinations, for better use; and what are its 
angry explosions but a rending asunder of its own fet- 
ters ? What are our physics, our mechanics, but attempts 
to liberate the hidden, slumbering, latent forces in mat- 
ter, in order that they may serve us ? What is our entire 
medical science? An endeavor to free the healthy forces 
of the body from the paralyzing ban of disease. Who 
laid this world in fetters, and who keeps it in chains, so 
that light can not stream through the rock, making it 
sparkle and flash; so that plants and trees are ever at 
straits to bring forth good fruit, when frost and heat 
and drought and the "destroyer" ruin it? Who binds 
the members of the halt and crippled, the tongues of the 
dumb, the ears of the deaf, the eyes of the blind, and 
the souls of us all with cords of avarice and selfishness, 
of hatred and of lust? "Ought not this woman," said 



THE BIBLE. 65 

Christ, "being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan 
hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this 
bond ?" Until you have grasped this, you wise and pru- 
dent of this world, your view of the world and the cosmos 
will remain inadequate. 

Many of the ancients and many Christians have be- 
lieved that this power of evil is limited to the earth, and 
that the stars are made of purer, heavenly substance, or 
even that they are the dwelling-place of the blessed. But 
in full accord with recent discoveries in astronomy which 
reveal even among the suns and cosmic bodies in the 
heavens an arising, dying off, and passing away, the 
Bible says that ^'the whole creation," not only the earth, 
''groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." 
What spectral analysis has taught us, — viz., that the 
entire world of fixed stars consists of the same substances 
and elemicnts of which the sun, the planets, and our 
earth consist — the Bible expressed long ago, saying, "The 
things which are seen-are temporal," therefore transitory, 
"but the things which are not seen are eternal." And 
it repeatedly proclaims, "The heavens and the earth shall 
pass away." Whatever passes away is not pure, is not 
holy. "All the host of heaven shall he dissolved, and the 
heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll; and all their 
host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, 
and as a falling fig from the fig-tree." (Isa. xxxiv, 4.) 
Whatever perishes and fades is sinful ; that is Bible doc- 
trine also. "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; 
for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away." 
Whatever God must create anew, has not fulfilled its 
purpose, has fallen away from Him. All these worlds be- 
long to the former kingdom of Satan, and through his 
5 



^^ THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD. 

falling away from God this bit of matter, the visible uni- 
verse, became rigid, half dead, and corruptible. 

What, then, is the purpose of the corruptible? It is 
a likeness of the incorruptible. The temporal is the 
shadow of the eternal; fleeting phenomena are to help 
to educate our souls to an idea of the true, the real, the 
heavenly, the flaming sight of which our earthly organs 
of sense, built of clay, could not endure; this is possible 
only to the resurrection body in a heavenly corporeality. 
This, too, God, with whom in every nation he that f eareth 
Him is accepted, put into the heart of man : This is not 
the world of developed existence and of truth, but of 
developing existence and of semblance; and in all ages 
noble minds, like Plato, recognized that this earthly life 
is the dream of a soul walking among images. God has 
breathed it into the human soul : There is a world, where 
that which we see on earth as likeness exists in its essence ; 
a world of absolute truth, of indestructible reality, there- 
fore of incorruptible glory. For this world even heathen 
tribes, savage, and merciless in battle, have hoped, and 
have anticipated it with joy. In this upper world of 
light have believed, of it have told and sung, mused, and 
dreamed (often grandly and beautifully), the Arab in 
the desert and the Hindoo in his rocky temples; the an- 
cient German in his dark forests, and the Celt in his 
sacred oak-groves; the viking, who, during a calm, and 
having no ship in sight, rested on his shield, and the 
shepherd in cold fogs on moor and heath; the Indian by 
the fire of his wigwam, and the Tunguse in icy polar 
nights, when the northern lights flashed across the heav- 
ens. We trust these simple, plain, true-hearted, taciturn, 
hard, robust men of nature, who heard voices from on 



THE BIBLE. 67 

high in deserts, on mountains, on seas, where the din of 
cities and factories and machinery and competition did 
not drown them, far more than the paper wisdom of the 
feverishly prating, who, with endless bombast, antago- 
nize our faith in yonder world, because in them this faith 
has died out. 

Man has at all times viewed this world according to 
the measure of his personality ; and he has a right to view 
it thus. So realistic Aristotle, who thought little of 
Plato's ideas^ was nevertheless under the necessity of 
positing back of the world of matter and its phenomena 
(which he surveyed in such a masterly manner) a fifth 
element (hence the expression quintessence) , ether, 
which was not subject to the imperfections of matter 
that adhere to the other four elements; without weight 
or lightness ; in which there is no arising and no passing 
away, no suffering, and no transformation; and out of 
which all heavenly bodies are formed. He^ too, antici- 
pated the heavenly sut)stance which the Bible portrays so 
beautifully. 

The Word of God tells us that the created world sur- 
rounding us is not only the likeness, but also the fruit, an 
effect of the true and eternal world, just as all organic 
life on earth is the product and effect of the forces of the 
sun. As heavenly forces animate nature, so heavenly 
laws control it. The laws of good preserve, the laws of 
evil corrupt it daily. There are no laws of matter dif- 
ferent from the laws of the spirit, as the shortsighted 
assume; else how could matter and spirit, body and soul, 
react on each other? Our mathematics is the likeness, 
rather the effect of heavenly mathematics, in which the 
heavenly number conceived by God is the law of the 



6^ THE BIBLB THB WORD OP GOD. 

universe; our chemistry is the likeness of a heavenly 
chemistry of eternal laws, according to which combina- 
tions of spirit and spirits are formed, act, and separate 
again; our physics the likeness of an eternal physica 
sacra, which regulates the true attributes, and the mutual 
relation of heavenly substances and spirits. There are 
not two Gods, a God of matter and nature, and a God of 
the spirit and of Christianity; the God who created the 
world is the Word that was made flesh, and that re- 
deemed the world. He redeemed it^ as he had created 
it, according to the same eternal, immutable, divine laws. 
This God says: / am one God. Unfortunately, many 
of His children do not understand Him in this point. 

The coadaptation of matter and spirit, which, of 
course, is not complete this side of heaven, appears in 
language, this highest and deepest and most discerning 
power and manifestation of the soul. And God said 
. . . and Adam said. Language is founded on spir- 
itual laws in nature, on the spirit in matter, and on the 
indissolubility of the two, as is shown by the great far- 
reaching significance of light and darkness in the spirit- 
ual and material creation, as well as in heaven and hell. 
As in art man expresses his thought, therefore his spirit, 
by means of space, time, number, sound, form, content, 
points and lines, vertical and horizontal lines, straight 
lines and curves, angles, and planes, because they all have 
mental import; so for the spirit, as well as for matter, 
language — and the Bible — properly and fittingly uses 
such expressions as above and below, large and small, 
light and heavy, high and low, far and near, pure and 
impure, hard, sweet, bitter, sour, poor, rich, food, gift, 
warmth, coldness, lukewarmness, day and night, height. 



THB BIBLE. 69 

depth, breadth, length, etc. Language recognizes, and 
the Bible confirms, that to grow and to eat and to build 
up, to sleep and to wake, to see, to hear, to grasp, to look 
at, to be evident, to give and to take, to arise and to pass 
away; that disease and health, life and death, have the 
same root in the material world, as in the intellectual 
world. This is not merely likeness and comparison, but 
the expression of a deep relationship, yea, the relation 
of cause and effect. Some day, the Word of God says, 
this schism and antithesis will cease, and glorious, eter- 
nal matter will be the visibility of the spirit, and the 
heavenly corporeality of all beings will be the concrete, 
plastic expression of their soul. Even on earth every 
form is a product of the spirit, and appeals as such to 
man ; wherever he sees form, he asks at once, Why ? For 
what purpose ? What does it mean ? What is it intended 
to say? 

But the Bible, the Word of a God who knows all 
things, also knows that a dense veil is hung over this 
entire creation. It, too, knows man to be "a weary guest 
in a dark world." It, too, knows "the torment of this 
narrow earthly life," and knows its source. We have 
turned away from God; His face no longer shines upon 
us ; we go our way, each holding converse with his own 
heart; for the sake of our sin the ground is cursed, and 
all creation groans and pines and languishes. "The ear- 
nest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifes- 
tation of the sons of God. For the creature was made 
subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him 
who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature 
itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of cor- 
ruption Into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 



70 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travail- 
eth in pain together until now. And not only they, but 
ourselves also^ which have the first fruits of the Spirit, 
even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for 
the adoption, to-wit, the redemption of our body." (Rom. 
viii, 19-23.) 

This groaning of the whole creation even enemies and 
haters of the Bible admit ; and they themselves are a fair 
example of it. But they reject redemption and the 
glorious liberty of the children of God offered them. 
Well, then, they may have what they choose. God gives 
without price, but he compels no one to accept. 



What does the Bible relate? The beginning of the 
Book is grand and simple. No foreword ; no preparation ; 
no appeal to conscience or to the religious sense; no ap- 
peal to authority, to facts of natural history, or to the 
legends of the nations. "In the beginning God created 
the heaven and the earth." An eternal rock, from which 
men can not chip off anything. 

"God created." And the grandest, the most incredi- 
ble, the most incomprehensible thing occurred. Eternity 
gave birth to time; spirit gave birth to matter. What 
does it mean to create ? To make divine ideas visible ; to 
shape eternal principles into ever-changing phenomena; 
for God to reveal Himself in His creation — abysses of 
thought, the depth of which no created mind can fathom. 
How can so many Christians, believing this miracle of 
miracles, and reverently saying, "In the beginning God 
created the heaven and the earth," stumble at every little 
miracle recorded in the Scriptures? They believe in the 



THB BIBLB, 71 

rock, but not in the grain of sand ; in the ocean, but not 
in the drop of water. In great days of God, the Father 
of Hghts, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow 
of turning, created not the earth (which had previously 
been created), but the surface of the earth, and the organ- 
isms on it; and these days were interrupted by nights 
of Satan, in which Gk)d's work stood still ; yea, in which 
the outbursts of the hostile nether world and "the powers 
of darkness" apparently destroyed it, as the leaves of the 
earth's crust show. 

"And God said." "He spake, and it was done; he 
commanded, and it stood fast." Wonderful, unsearch- 
able depth! The Son, the Word, the Logos spoke, and 
every word was a creation, a making visible and tangible 
of that which he alone from eternity had seen and heard 
in the glory of His Father. We, whose word is so dead 
and impotent, can not comprehend how these divine 
words of the Creator became visible; how they assumed 
being and form, yea, life, and were crystallized to plants 
and fishes and birds, to mysterious things that have in 
themselves the unknown law of their existence, and power 
to reproduce themselves indefinitely. 

"God created man in His own image, in the image of 
God created he him." The Elohim purposed to make a 
being out of the dust of the earth, and they breathed 
eternal life into it. "In their image !" The human form 
is not the original, as a copy of which Jehovah appeared 
unto Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, John ; but it is a likeness of 
the primal form of the "firstborn of every creature," in 
which form this Logos, who certainly was not without 
form and appearance in the glory of the Father, created 
angels prior to man (Ezek. i, 26; Rev. x, 1-3), and then 



72 THE BIB LB THE WORD OF GOD, 

Adam **in His image." Did not the soul of Adam, this 
breath of God, contain all powers, as Boehme says, all 
beginnings of Deity ? Indeed ! They are all in you, son 
of the dust, animated clod of clay, hidden though they 
be, weakened by sin, unknown to you ; and it is well that 
you do not know how great you are. Some day, in the 
resurrection, they will break forth with might in eternal 
glory. *'I have said. Ye are Elohim." (Psa. Ixxxii, 6; 
Johnx, 34.) 

"And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in 
Eden ; and there he put the man whom he had formed." 
(For the earth was not paradise. ) A gracious God ! And 
thus he still clothes the earth annually, and commands 
plants to produce out of stone and water millions of 
tons of food, corn, and oil and wine, besides innumerable 
useful materials. But the blinded, hardened heart of 
man says. That comes to pass naturally; the eternal 
forces of nature accomplish it ! We can not imagine the 
magnificence and real beauty of a garden planted by God, 
and the delight of living by the four rivers of paradise; 
nor can we grasp the unfathomable story of the tree of 
life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the 
fall of Adam. Man fell. Even to-day the echo of the 
curse, sweat and toil, guilt and death, are too evident all 
about us to be denied; and those who attempted it have 
never yet answered the question, Why do we die ? 

In a few words the Bible discloses the violent life 
(fifteen hundred years) of antediluvian mankind, among 
them giants many centuries old, strong and defiant and 
arrogant; Titans, whose memory lives in the legends of 
the nations. They wandered hither and thither, each one 
the father, the king, and the ruler of a people; they had 



THB BIBLE . n 

their laws, their art ; they planted and builded, they mar- 
ried and were given in marriage; we are dwarfs com- 
pared with them. But of each of these it is said, "And 
he died." Have you ever paused to consider that you 
will some day learn to know all these mighty men per- 
sonally (and either Abel or Cain) ; that you will behold 
all their deeds, and, in the day of judgment, will hear 
"all the hard words that these wicked sinners have spoken 
against God?'' For the people and nations who once 
walked the earth as we do, laughed and wept and thought 
the world belonged to them, are not fleeting shadows on 
the wall, now vanished forever. No; the Bible says 
humanity is a whole ; the dead are immortal, creatures of 
the same God, children of the same Father. And as 
brothers and sisters, who left home young and before they 
had learned to know one another, meet later on, so we 
shall meet one another in the many mansions of our 
Father's house. Man laments and hopes that everything 
is corruptible. "No, everything is eternal," answers the 
eternal Word; your words and deeds, your unpardoned 
sin and its punishment, and also pardon and grace and 
life. 

A great judgment destroyed these great nations, and 
the terror of the flood that buried them still lives in the 
legends of all nations. The first chapter of the history 
of the world is ended. A new human race arises, weaker 
and more corruptible, and is scattered over the face of 
the earth. Then the Bible reports how God chose a na- 
tion, in the first place a man; and henceforth it adheres 
to the story of this man, and follows the development of 
this nation, the aim of which is the incarnation of the 
Word. And what more than this ought the Bible to 



74 THB BIBLB THB WORD OP GOD. 

relate? Perchance give us a record of all nations, their 
wars and their sins, their lusts and their murderous 
deeds; how everywhere the strong oppressed the weak, 
and how these rebelled and wreaked bloody vengeance; 
how individuals became great and mighty and opulent 
by work and fear of God, and then were ruined by pleas- 
ure and luxury? For the history of mankind is very 
simple, turning about the lust of the eyes, the lust of the 
flesh, and the pride of life, and it drops injustice and 
falsehood, blood and tears. 

No, this continuous repetition of the same sins could 
not teach us much. Therefore the Bible remains indi- 
vidual; it shows all men in the life-history of one man, 
all nations in the history of one nation. "Get thee out of 
thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's 
house, unto a land that I will show thee!" A short, sim- 
ple, startling request. As the history of the human race 
begins with the disobedience of an I-know-better, so the 
history of God's people begins with the obedience of a 
faith without sight. What all is contained in this com- 
mand ; what a task, far greater in an age and a country in 
which the stranger was without rights and without pro- 
tection, despised and hated! But Abraham believed 
God, the only thing that could have pleased Him — for 
what need has He of our works? — and it was imputed 
unto Him for righteousness. And as every word of the 
Bible is addressed to every man, so throughout the Bible 
this command comes to every one who reads it: "Get 
thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, unto a land 
that I will show thee." 

Everywhere in this book we meet with persons of 
strong character, of whom it makes mention in a few 



THB BIBLE. 75 

pithy words. What insurpassable portrayal in the ex- 
cellent drama ''Joseph !" the somewhat precocious Joseph ; 
later on the aging father, with his unfounded reproaches 
and fears, and with his overflowing joy when he was 
freed from the sorrow that had so long lain heavy on 
his heart. Grand also these shepherds, his brothers; 
hard, gruff, merciless, but also grand in their repentance 
and their fidelity. ''How shall I go up to my father," 
Judah exclaims, "lest peradventure I see the evil that 
shall come on him? Let thy servant abide instead of 
the lad, a bondman to my Lord." Grand is the scene in 
which Joseph makes himself known to his brothers. In 
the immense pillared hall, the walls of which are covered 
with mysterious hieroglyphics, there sits on a golden 
throne the second to Pharoah, his tall, beardless, statue- 
like figure clothed in white byssus, his bare arms orna- 
mented with golden bracelets, on his forehead the sacred 
golden serpent, and, through an interpreter, is speaking 
cold, threatening words to frightened, weatherbeaten 
shepherd strangers. These are conscience-smitten, and, 
growing pale, whisper one to the other, "We are verily 
guilty concerning our brother." Then the prince arises, 
descends from his throne^ stretches his arms out toward 
them, and exclaims in well-known Hebrew accents, "I 
am Joseph, your brother." How beautiful, and how 
human withal the doubts and the joy of the old father 
when he heard the incredible report! 

But the grandest character of the Old Testament is 
Moses, the man with the thunders of Sinai, who beheld 
what no other earthborn man was ever permitted to be- 
hold. Forty years a prince in the palaces of Egypt ; forty 
years a shepherd in the wild wastes of Midian; forty 



7^ THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

years in the power of God, he bears his people through the 
wilderness, as a mother carries her babe, and then dies 
on Mount Nebo, ''according to the Word of the Lord;" 
literally, ''at the mouth of the Lord," which the rabbins 
interpret, "by a kiss of the Lord." (Deut. xxxiv, 5.) 
What inexpressible words this man may have heard, what 
heavenly mysteries and divine visions he may have seen, 
when, oblivious of the world, he was with Jehovah forty 
days and forty nights, and ate no bread and drank no 
water ! His countenance is radiant with it ; his thunder- 
ing words flash it ; the song of Moses, which John hears 
the redeemed sing in heaven, echoes it. And the Christian 
is permitted to ascend Sinai with him; to come into the 
presence of his God; to hear unspeakable things out of 
His law, and to forget the world below, which is danc- 
ing around its golden calf. 

Great is the law that he brought down. Precious 
are the suggestions it contains, concerning how, in the 
new earth, glorified matter, minerals, plants, and animals, 
shall serve toward the true w^orship of God. Deeply 
symbolical, mysteriously typical is the likeness of the 
heavenly temple. Out of the desert of this world the 
child of God steps into the court, and through the purify- 
ing water and devouring Ariel, the lion of God, it enters 
the sanctuary, where with twelve loaves the all-nourish- 
ing Father daily feeds the twelve tribes of Israel, where 
the Son's intercession unceasingly rises from the altar 
of incense, and where the seven lamps of the candle- 
stick, which are the seven spirits of God, always burn — 
a proclamation of the Trinity which the wise among the 
Jewish people well understood. But in the holy of holies, 
in an unapproachable light which to the creature seems 



TUB BIBLE. 77 

dense darkness^ there is enthroned above cherubim the 
God whom no man ever has seen, and unto whom only the 
high priest (Christ), and he not without blood, can draw 
nigh. 

Not less beautiful, prophetic, and significant in all 
their deeds are David, this hero of a hundred battles, 
poet, singer, and prophet ; Solomon, the great king, who, 
weary of power and riches and pleasures and of his own 
wisdom, exclaims at the close of his life, "Vanity of 
vanities ; all is vanity !" 

The idyl "Ruth" shows us the peaceful, happy life 
of the people of Israel; and the kindly disposition and 
patriarchal relation existing mutually between Boaz and 
his employees is beautifully illustrated in his greeting 
to them, "The Lord be with you," and their answer, "The 
Lord bless thee!" i Kings xxii is a beautiful, well- 
rounded narration, with exact, perfect psychological de- 
piction of the characters entering into it. Amid a weak, 
lying vacillating people the prophet of Jehovah stands like 
a rock. 

The Book of Esther is a grand painting, a mighty 
drama taken from the history of the holy people; and if 
it had been found anywhere else, it would count for one of 
the most valuable monuments of ancient literature and 
history. Persian magnificence, the dignity of a ruler, 
the pride of a queen, the insolent haughtiness of a favor- 
ite ; and at the door of the palace lonely, silent, inflexible, 
gloomy Mordecai, a type of the Jewish nation in its 
bondage and its unbroken power ; and in the palace lovely, 
timid Esther. Haughty Haman's star rises higher and 
higher, until suddenly and with terrible tragedy it is ex- 
tinguished on the despised and hated nation. And here, 



7^ THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

as so often, the Bible describes an entire scene in a single 
word: "And the king and Haman sat down to drink; 
but the city Shushan was perplexed." Thus after a chase 
and before a drinking-bout Louis XIV revoked the edict 
of Nantes, which had been refuted by his favorite Lou- 
vois, and thus brought unspeakable sorrow to over two 
millions of his most faithful subjects. 

Then there are various types of powerful individ- 
uality, such as Joab, the son of Zeruiah, a grim hero, like 
unto Hagen in the "Niebelungenlied." He knows noth- 
ing but fidelity toward the king ; gladly and treacherously 
he murders whoever opposes him or the king; in time 
of peace he kills his gallant opponent Abner, Amasa, and 
rebellious Absalom; is furious on account of the father's 
(to him effeminate) grief at the revolter's death; defiant, 
as he had lived, the old hero dies at the altar by the 
sword. 

Resembling him, and yet differing from him, Jehu 
later appears, — this captain from a distant garrison, 
anointed by the prophet with oil and fire to be the de- 
stroyer of the cursed house of Ahab. Like a storm, like 
the wrath of God, he rages; "furiously" he drives his 
steeds to Jezreel ; from his chariot he pierces the fleeing 
kings with arrows ; he commands the painted queen, ap- 
pearing at an upper window, to be thrown down to the 
dogs ; defiant as a knight, he exhorts the cowardly inhab- 
itants of Samaria to fight valiantly for the house of their 
king. But they tremble before him, and he has the bloody 
heads of the sons of the king laid in two heaps at the en- 
tering in of the gate, whereupon he scornfully proclaims 
an assembly of the priests of Baal, and has them slaugh- 
tered, — a driving hailstorm, that left neither branch nor 



THH BIBLE. 79 

leaf on the genealogical tree of Ahab; for the Lord had 
spoken. 

Thereupon prophets arise. Elijah, the man of mighty 
deeds, who suddenly appears, without recorded tribe or 
family, baptized with the Spirit and with fire; who 
preaches with, destroys his enemies with, and is carried 
home in, fire from heaven. We know little of him, but 
how powerful he stands before us, a man of iron, whether, 
standing alone, he laughs to scorn his whole nation and 
the four hundred prophets of Baal, or whether, his heart 
full of holy wrath, he walks forty days and forty nights 
through the solitary desert to the place, where Jehovah 
had given the law, in order there to complain to God that 
His law is despised, and that he alone is left ! 

Different personality still we find in Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
Ezekiel, Daniel. Isaiah beholds the coming of the Mes- 
siah, seeing, far beyond His rejection and the rejection of 
Israel, how God eventually turns unto His people, and 
he exclaims in words more than human : "Rejoice, Zion, 
put on thy beautiful garments ! The days of thy mourn- 
ing shall be ended." Not so Jeremiah, the man of re- 
proach, of bonds, and of sorrow, who with burning tears 
bewails the falling away of his people, and mourns for 
Jerusalem. 

Then Ezekiel, the mouthpiece of Jehovah — of Jehovah 
full of wrath, riding on cherubim, whose long suffering 
with wayward Israel is ended, and whose glory departs 
from the temple. 

Differing from these, Daniel, the great wise states- 
man, the noble, grieving stranger of royal descent on the 
shores of the Euphrates, the counselor of three genera- 
tions of kings, the intrepid seer, who sees kingdoms rise 



So THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

and fall, until the ever-changing whirl of the world's his- 
tory is terminated by God in the kingdom that endures 
eternally. 

These are great men, whose grandeur only they can 
in some measure appreciate who are born of the same 
spirit. Compared with these, the conquest-loving, vain- 
glorious celebrities of secular history are quite small. 
The human race is in need of great men. It needs 
superior men (Uebermenschen) , not only in order that 
they direct its affairs according to divine counsels, but 
also in order that, in looking upon them it may ever anew 
gain faith in itself, for, looking upon its own indigence 
and miserableness, the human race is ever in danger of 
losing faith in itself. We meet with greater men of this 
type in the Word of God than in secular history. Moses is 
more than Alexander or Csesar or Charles the Great; 
Elijah towers high above Mohammed; Paul and John 
teach higher philosophy and theosophy than Plato. In 
this respect, too, the Bible surpasses books written by 
men. 

But in the center, among all these men of God, there 
is the radiant form of Him who is more than man, with- 
out fear or sin, no deceit in His mouth. His words noth- 
ing but truth, all His deeds light and blessing, His life and 
death love and obedience toward the Father. And if we 
would see the complete likeness of man, as he ought to 
be, and as God would have him in His likeness, and as 
he will be eternally, we find in the first chapter of Revela- 
tion the second Adam, whom we shall be like, even as we 
have borne the likeness of the first Adam. He stands 
there a true lord of the new creation, full of power, no 
longer dark or merely shone through, but self-luminous, 



THE BIBLE. 8i 

a sun and center of light; and so we, too, shall stand in 
the new paradise by crystal rivers, under trees of life; 
but without prohibition, therefore without transgression. 
For God never gives up what He purposes. The malig- 
nity and enmity of Satan and of men can but make the 
fulfillment of His word more glorious ; and the last chap- 
ter of the Bible is a repetition of the first in much higher 
potency. The natural law of creation for the nations, 
the law of Sinai for Israel, the law of Christ for His own, 
— these three revelations of God, incomprehensibly spir- 
itualized and magnified, and their blessed results for en- 
tire redeemed humanity, the Bible promises us. 

In all these reports of, and concerning, the history of 
the earth the incorruptible shines through the corrupti- 
ble. God's Word writes from a heavenly perspective, 
from the standpoint of eternity, and places everything 
and every person, together with all his deeds, in the pres- 
ence of God. It does not stop half-way, but unswerv- 
ingly carries all principles through to their extreme con- 
sequences, to the point where the wisdom of God comes to 
be foolishness, comes to be absurdity in the sight of 
human reason. It relates the temporal ; it does not stop 
with the shrubbery of the temporal, however, but con- 
tinues till it reaches the rock ; and this refreshes him who 
has tired of the temporal. We find it so in the story of 
Job. In his circumstances a modern man would com- 
plain of being ruined by fatal circumstances and ele- 
mental occurrences, of being derided by his wife, of be- 
ing visited with severe sickness. But Job's cry is the 
eternal cry of mankind, the cry of the creature to the 
Creator: My Maker! Why? O why? How shall I har- 
monize your justice and your mercy ? Thus it is written, 
6 



82 THB BIBLE THB WORD OP GOD. 

"The thing that David had done displeased the Lord," 
not, this mean sensuality, this shocking treachery toward 
a faithful servant, etc. ; no, his deed (fact, factum), man's 
deeds, the ''facts" of his life displease God — an absolute 
fact. 

Moreover, the Bible is a living word, therefore an 
organism, every part of which lives and is effective. As 
the body of man can not live on inorganic matter, but 
only on organic and living, or on matter that was living, 
so the soul of man can not live on mere stones, on facts 
and data, be they never so many. No encyclopedia, 
however complete, can satisfy it; it can feed on living 
things only. Such the Bible offers the soul; and in this 
respect, also, it surpasses all other books. What effects 
it has produced in millions of souls, and yet not wholly 
the same in any two ! Eternally the same Word, it is 
yet different for each individual. God repeats Himself 
ever and never ; He is the living one, we are the dead. 

This Bible is a tree of life, through the immense ever- 
green crowns of which heavenly spirit- winds now rustle 
softly, now roar mightily; bearing fruit that brings heal- 
ing and strength and health and eternal life to those poi- 
soned by sin. It is a dreadful and delightful book; full 
of heavenly peace that transcends all thought ; full of the 
thunders and lightnings of the mighty God who shatters 
nations like a potter's vessels, and before whom nations 
are as a drop in a bucket; full of the most tender and 
loving comfortings and promises of a God who feeds the 
birds, numbers the hair upon our head, and in answer 
to the supplications of a poor mother heals her sick child ; 
a book which in simple words answers the deepest ques- 
tions that have ever busied the thought of mankind ; that 



THH BIBLE. S3 

answers a child and toys with the wisdom of the wise ; a 
poem and an epos so powerful, so all-embracing, so deep 
and high, that no man has ever written its equal; its 
theme the incarnation of a Creator for the purpose of 
redeeming his creation. 

In all ages the greatest minds understood that the life 
and the deeds of men are rooted in the world below and 
the world above; and this alone gives them import and 
value. Homer and the old tragedians, the Edda and the 
Bhagavat Gita, Dante and Milton, Byron, Klopstock, 
Shakespeare, Goethe, have all written trilogies; and it 
is the ban and impotence of so many modern men that 
they believe great things can be wrought on earth and 
with earthly things alone. Where is there a poem like 
the Bible, full of the breath of the living God ; in which 
beings of light and of darkness, heavenly and hellish 
forces, devils and angels, struggle in the heavens of 
heavens to accomplish great purposes that embrace the 
universe? Where is4here a production of the human 
mind which in such an incomprehensibly deep manner 
combines fates, eternal unsearchable decrees, with the 
freedom of man, and ascribes to his little soul the power 
to co-operate with God for God, with Satan for Satan, 
and to gladden or to grieve God and Satan and angels 
and devils? 

The Bible addresses itself to the entire human race. 
Other sacred books are addressed to the wise and prudent, 
or to the courageous and energetic. Thus the Koran 
calls upon its devotees to fight courageously and to con- 
quer the world; those falling in battle against the unbe- 
lieving shall enter paradise. But what of those who lack 
strength and courage to wield the sword? What of the 



84 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

unnumbered who are bodily and intellectually weak, im- 
potent, diseased? Thus slaves and serfs, soldiers, public 
officials (in India perhaps tax-gatherers and toll-gath- 
erers), criminals, children under twelve years of age — 
just those who are weak and in need of comfort — are ex- 
cluded from the Sangha, or holy communion of Buddha. 
Compare with these Christ's conduct toward just such. 
The Bhagavat Gita and the Rigveda, the teachings of 
Confucius, the Greek philosophers, preach eloquently the 
culture of virtue, a contemplative life, contempt of earthly 
possessions and suffering. But millions find no virtue in 
themselves, have no time for a contemplative life ; bowed 
to the earth they must earn their bread in the sweat of 
their brow, must groan and die. And as to contempt of 
suffering, it has properly been said that this philosophy 
is quite good in view of past suffering, fairly good in view 
of future suffering, but utterly worthless in view of pres- 
ent suffering. The human race is not in need of wisdom 
and philosophy, but of help against its distress, its sin 
and death. This the Bible alone gives. "Come imto Me," 
Christ says, "all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and 
I will give you rest." And He has kept His promise. His 
Gospel has comforted the poor sick mother, as well as 
Newton, the clearest mind among scientists; the blind 
beggar to whom it was read, as well as King Charles I, 
before his execution ; the Negro in Africa, as well as the 
cultured European. And since this Word of God is ad- 
dressed to all His creatures, it contains no esoterics. In 
Egypt and India, in Persia, Babylon, and Greece, the 
priests guarded the mysteries of their highest religious 
services most carefully against those not initiated, against 
the common masses ; and many cleansings, and frequently 



THE BIBLE. 85 

long and dreadful trials were necessary (as e. g., in the 
Eleusinian mysteries), in order to arrive step by step 
in the innermost sanctuary of knowledge. But what 
error, what injustice to my fellow-men, if, having found 
aught of truth, I withhold it from them, or share it with 
a few of like mind with myself, and hide the light from 
others! Not so the Bible. It, like the sun, shines for 
rich and poor, worthy and unworthy; it knows no caste, 
no secret union, no truth hidden by hieroglyphics or dark 
symbols, meet only for the scholar. Shall truth hide, or 
is God ashamed of His Word ? No ! Christ says : "What 
I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light; and what 
ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops." 
"Go ye, and teach all nations." "Let him that is athirst 
come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of 
life freely!" (Rev. xxii, 17.) He who knows the Bible, 
knows that there is no great, deep, lofty, fruitful thought 
in the world, that can not be found in this Book. 

To all questions the Bible has brief, striking answers, 
and a thousand years ago it knew all that to-day moves 
the hearts of men. All science must exclaim with Swam- 
merdam, "I really do not know why we die;" for death, 
notwithstanding it has come to be such an every-day 
affair among us, remains a riddle to science. The Bible 
answers, "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God 
is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." What 
all man promulgates concerning the causes of social evils, 
and how he believes to have found the causes for the 
same in this and that! The Bible answers briefly, "Sin 
is a reproach {Verderhen'] to any people," an every-day 
evident, absolute fact. What all we have written con- 
cerning the duties of men ! The Bible says : "What doth 



S6 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

the Lord, thy God, require of thee, but to fear the Lord 
thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and 
to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with 
all thy soul ?" "There be many that say. Who will show 
us any good ? Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy coun- 
tenance upon us!" Two views of life in two sentences. 
How full of care we are, and how we excuse and color 
our being so! The Word says tersely, "Be careful for 
nothing!" But we can not make up our minds to live 
like the fowls of the air, and to grow and blossom like 
the lilies of the field. Or others try to place us under 
the law again, saying that eating meat or drinking wine 
is the ruination of men, or contending that we must again 
observe the Sabbath. But the Word of the new Cove- 
nant says, "Let no man therefore judge you in meat or 
in drink or in respect of the Sabbath days." Under the 
new name of Spiritualism others interrogate the dead, a 
practice common among ancient nations, and still com- 
mon among the uncivilized; e. g., the Samoyedes, the 
Laplanders, and the Indians; allow themselves to be de- 
ceived by sly mediums, or occasionally by wretched shades 
from Hades, who, robbed of the light of the sun, and, 
having received no other, are more vain, stupid, and ig- 
norant in this their darkness than they were on earth. 
Of such dead, not of those whom angels carry into Abra- 
ham's bosom, vSolomon said, "The dead know not any- 
thing." "In the grave there is no work, nor device, nor 
knowledge, nor wisdom." On those who interrogate 
them, the Bible passes sentence contemptuously : "When 
rhey shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have famil- 
iar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter: 
should not a people seek unto their God? for the living 



THB BIBLE. 87 

to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: if they 
speak not according to this word, it is because there is 
no Hght in them." The much debated qtiestion, whether 
miracles or no, it answers with the only and eternally 
valid counter question, "Is there anything too hard for 
God?" How much superfluous matter has been spoken 
and written on the so-called restitution of all things, in- 
stead of quietly leaving all such decrees to God, whose 
alone it is to judge! One said unto him, "Lord, are there 
few that be saved ? and He said unto them. Strive to enter 
in at the strait gate." (Luke xiii, 23, 24.) Others 
teach that the Christian must attain to sinless holiness in 
this world. But the Word says, "If we say that we 
have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in 
us." A sinless man would be a man who loves God with 
all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his thought. 
This earthly tabernacle could not endure such love; the 
soul would rend asunder the body, and soar to God. 

And of the words of man, this greatest and mightiest 
revelation of his soul, according to which we shall be 
justified or damned, the Word of God says, "Let your 
communication be, Yea, yea; nay, nay;" a great word, 
reaching up to heaven and down to hell. Yea and nay is 
an affirmative or negative answer to something said; for 
man can not posit anything, but can only affirm or negate, 
what God or Satan posits. There is a God of the good, 
whose entire creation is yea and Amen ; there is a God of 
evil, the God of this world, "the liar, and the father of it," 
who ever and eternally says "No!" to whatever the 
former says and does. Man hovers between these two 
great principles of all existence; and it is true knowledge 



SS THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD, 

and divine life reverently to say "Yea !" to all God says, 
does, wills, and demands of us, and to say "No!" to all 
that the devil, the world, and the flesh whisper to us. In 
heaven there is eternal Yea, in hell eternal Nay. Of this 
clear knowledge of absolute, not conditioned and rela- 
tive truth, the Bible says, "The truth shall make you 
free.'' Therefore whatever does not make free, is not 
truth. You enlightened and unbiased fancy yourselves 
free because you have rid yourselves of God; have rid 
your life and your education of His Word ; have rid your 
literature of the laws of the true and the good ; have rid 
your art of the laws of the beautiful. But your entire 
enlightenment, your culture, and your art do not rid you 
of your pride and your egotism; of your burning desire 
for money, possessions, and pleasures ; of your thirst for 
other and new things; of the cares of poverty, and the 
deceit of riches; of the anxiety, of life, and the fear of 
death. Your enlightenment is not truth, and you are not 
free. 

The Bible is true; in fact, the only true thing amid 
the great lie of this world. It says, "The whole world 
lieth in wickedness," and the world itself knows it. "Do 
not allow yourself to be deceived!" the children of this 
world earnestly or smilingly call to one another as the 
substance of their worldly wisdom — and go on deceiv- 
ing. They speak loudly and boldly, laugh and dance, 
go to the beer-table and to the variety theater, seem to 
be merry and happy; and, if they would but admit it, 
there is not one among them all who has not in his heart 
entertained the thought of suicide. Their happiness is 
falsehood. Or they intoxicate themselves with the doc- 
trine of Zarathustra, and dream of superior men ( Ucber- 



THE BIBLE. ^9 

menschen), fair beasts, laughing lions; and upon awak- 
ing they are again the beast of burden, which, driven by 
the heartless whip of need, treads wearily on down the 
path of life, hoping to find a few thistles along the way ; 
and the Uchermenschen die in insane asylums. False- 
hood, falsehood! The leaders in literature proclaim the 
intellectual emancipation of man, and offer, as the sub- 
stance of liberty, free love, and suicide! And emanci- 
pated women cry, "More culture!" speak much and 
proudly of nobility of soul and character, and then run 
away from husband and children, and write fiction full 
of adultery and filth of soul. Falsehood ! All these call 
themselves the enlightened, and do not know whence they 
are, why they exist, and whither they go ; call themselves 
the friends of light, and teach that we and the universe 
will some day vanish into eternal night. But us, who 
believe that we come from the eternal light, and that this 
light will eternally shine upon us, they call pessimists and 
opponents of enlightenment. And then the world com- 
passionately calls us ^'broken men." Falsehood also! 
Who was the broken man — Paul, who, bound by cruel 
Nero, could exclaim, "Rejoice in the Lord alway; and 
again I say, rejoice;" "I am persuaded, that neither death, 
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, 
nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from 
the love of God, which is in Christ our Lord ;" or Nero, 
who, pale and trembling, looks about in vain for a hiding- 
place where he might save his wretched life? Was 
Luther in Worms the broken man, or his opponent. Em- 
peror Charles V, in the cloister at St. Just, tired of life 
and of the world? What "broken" person, threatened 



90 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

by the disfavor of princes and by severe, probably life- 
long, imprisonment, exclaimed : 

" Without fear and without trembling 
Christians dare an3rwhere 

To appear without dissembling. 
And, though death destructive reigneth, 

Still anew courage true, 
Calm, and undismayed remaineth ?" 

Which one wrote the joyful hymn, ''Go forth, my heart, 
and seek delight?" or the one felt and sung by thousands 
of Christians: 

" My heart with joy is bounding, 
And can not mournful be ; 
With gladsome songs resounding, 
It does but sunshine see ?" 

Where are broken men? Who fills our prisons with 
bankrupt bank directors, absconding cashiers, founders 
of bogus stock companies, swindlers of all kinds ? Who 
fills the asylums for nervously and mentally deranged 
with overworked business men, ambitious scholars, dis- 
appointed artists and actors, philosophers and poets, 
crazed by their own ideas ? Who supplies the dissecting- 
table of the amphitheater with corpses of criminals and 
suicides, of ravished maidens and poor starved wenches, 
of those ruined by drink and vice, of those who through 
their own fault or the fault of others, have lost faith in 
God and in themselves — Christianity or the world ? 

With uncolored truthfulness and cold impartiality 
the Bible portrays this falsehood and guilt of the worid, 
as well as of the pious, and the penalty therefor. What 



THB BIBLE. 91 

is it that holds together the world, the intellectual and 
the material? Not the wisdom nor the art nor the 
ability nor the works of men, but the justice of God, the 
iron law of psychic development, according to which we, 
in every moment, are the product of our works, words, 
and thoughts; are to-day the fruit of yesterday and the 
day before yesterday. It is the divine law of nature, 
according to which guilt and punishment are equated 
with mathematical precision. And all this the Bible 
traces back consistently and unrelentingly to the great 
primal law that radiates from God and rules the uni- 
verse. Light and warmth, knowledge and love, life and 
joy, strength and understanding, decrease as the square of 
the distance from God, the sole source of light and life. 
A well-known critic ridicules the fact that the history 
of the people of Israel consists of the monotonous repe- 
tition of falling away, being punished, and returning 
again unto Jehovah. Yea, and the history of all mankind 
is none other. Through fear of the Lord, in whatever 
form, nations and kingdoms are blessed, become great 
and powerful. Through falling away from God and 
through idolatry they are ruined, whether the idols are 
called Baal, Astarte, Minerva, Venus, Apollo, or science, 
reason, progress, pleasure, dollar. This is shown by the 
history of the world; this the German nation, too, will 
experience. But here^ as everywhere, the Bible alone 
goes back to the root of things. In it the justice of God 
marches through the centuries, grand, lofty, and unmer- 
ciful. More tragic than Macbeth, psychologically truer 
and deeper than any drama of Shakespeare or Schiller, 
Racine or Sophocles, is the Biblical biography of Saul. 
Elsewhere we are shown in a single verse the logical, 



92 THE BIBIM THB WORD OP GOD, 

inevitable close of a self-seeking life. "And when Aliitho- 
phel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his 
ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his 
city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, 
and died, and was buried in the sepulcher of his father.'' 
(2 Sam. xvii, 23.) The touching drama of a soul in its 
grim and silent determination ! Was that the rash, un- 
premeditated deed of one not wholly responsible, as we 
are wont to say by way of apology? No, it is the mathe- 
matical product and the quotient of a life of that kind. 
And that is true still. Non-imputable despair and in- 
sanity are not casual phenomena, unconnected and with- 
out cause. 

But for those who love him, God changes everything, 
even guilt and punishment, for the better. David ha'd 
sinned greatly through lust of the flesh and murder; 
great was the retribution so minutely visited upon him 
for years in the sensuous life of Amnon and his murder 
at the hands of Absalom. (2 Sam. xii, 11, 12-16, 21, 22.) 
God's mill grinds slowly, but fine. But the salutary 
fruits thereof can be seen in the fifty-first Psalm, and in 
his entire subsequent lift. Jacob wanted to get rich at 
Laban's, and he reached the goal, energetically pursued 
for years. But God showed him the vanity of posses- 
sions, in the night in which he feared the sword of Esau ; 
on the day in which he lost his beloved Joseph; or when 
in the famine he suffered want. 

The Bible is an inexhaustible source of genuine 
philosophy and true psychology. For it knows, as no 
other book does, all the longing and waiting of the human 
heart. Yea, waiting! Our life is a waiting for some- 
thing that does not want to come. 



THB BIBLB, 93 

" We wait, whether laughing or weeping ; 
We wait, whether waking or sleeping ; 
We wait, though of vanity weary ; 
We wait, though in feverish hurry ; 
We wait, if the goal promise gladness, 
Or fill us with dread and with sadness." 

And when we have waited a lifetime for many things 
that do not come, we finally wait, uneasy and disap- 
pointed, for that which surely will come, death, and then 
— the great nothing! This waiting of the godly and the 
ungodly; this expectant tarrying of our souls; this our 
living not in the present, but in the future, proves that 
this life's purpose is not life itself, but the preparation 
for something future. The world does not know for 
what it waits, or what awaits it ; it freely admits that its 
eternal future is hidden from it. The Bible knows what 
awaits every man, the godly and the ungodly; and this, 
too, is a proof of its divinity. They will both reap what 
they have sown, and eat the fruits of their works. Abso- 
lute logic of all existence, evident truth. ''The hope of 
the righteous shall be gladness." ''We wait for the re- 
demption of our body." "We look for that blessed hope, 
and the glorious appearing of the great God and our 
Savior Jesus Christ." "We look for new heavens and a 
new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." 

The Bible alone meets the requirements of the soul. 
For the soul of man was planned for great things, and 
feels that it was created to rule and to possess ; created for 
joy and pleasure, for power and liberty. The world also 
mistakes, when it fancies that Christians are people who 
have no taste for art and poetry, for all that is great and 
lofty and beautiful. Because a spark of eternity has 
fallen into their soul^ and has kindled a thirst that no 



94 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

water on earth can quench ; because they are filled with a 
burning desire for the good, the true, and the beautiful, 
they make greater demands than the children of this 
world. They can not be content with the sight of the 
most beautiful temples and palaces, nor of the Sistine 
Madonna, nor with the possession of a collection of paint- 
ings, be they ever so valuable. They can not be content 
with such possessions as safely invested capital ; business 
enterprises, or factories, however profitable; villas, with 
all possible modern conveniences, with large parks and 
private hunting-grounds. For we see that all these 
things do not satisfy the souls of their owners, and daily 
we hear that they have been "left behind." We want 
something absolutely safe, incorruptible, and indestructi- 
ble; something that no being in the universe, neither 
death nor devil, can rob us of; and we want it complete 
in its beauty, entire in its verity, perfect in its goodness, 
incomprehensible in its grandeur, its height, and its 
depth. We can not be content with less. 

The Bible offers ideals and aims grander and loftier 
than any ever offered in any book written by man. God 
created man dust of dust, and therefore he cleaves to the 
dust, and in it arduously gains his sustenance. But God 
breathed into him the breath of life, and he became a 
living soul. This living soul can never be content with 
the dust of the earth. Longingly it remembers its origin, 
and feels within itself something divine, that no earthly 
thing can satisfy. It dreams of superterrestrial beauty, 
of heavenly purity, of incorruptible possessions, of un- 
fading glory, of true knowledge, of great struggles, of 
heroic deeds, and of victory. This thirst is the source of 
all poetry, all art, all imaginations and endeavors of man. 



THU BIBLB. 95 

And because this thirst is divine, God will satisfy it; 
but not with mean and corruptible things that must be 
left behind in death. Did not Roman emperors have 
everything that the earth can offer of riches, glory, pos- 
sessions, pleasures? And despite all these, they were 
often fools, like Nero, Caligula, Heliogabalus. Before 
his death Septimius Severus said, "I was everything, 
and it has profited me nothing!" And even Hadrian, 
one of the best among them, dying sighed, "Poor little 
soul of mine! Whither wilt thou flutter now?" But if 
you will believe God, and in this faith will despise the 
world. He is minded to reward you with eternal values. 
Would you have possessions, "he that overcometh shall 
inherit all things, and I will be His God, and he shall be 
My son." Of the new earth you shall have all you desire 
and can use for blessedness, together with a beautiful 
dwelling-place "not made with hands," one of the many 
mansions in our great Father's house ; for to us the whole 
creation is the house of our Father. Would you have 
honor? He has unfading crowns and palms of victory. 
Would you have knowledge? You shall be permitted 
to see God, and in Him the eternities, their creations, all 
universes from the star to the atom, their rise, their dura- 
tion, and their passing away. What incomprehensible, 
dazzling knowledge, to behold clearly in this primal 
source all the causes of being, and the how, why, and 
wherefore of all creations! Would you have art? Its 
home is in heaven, where it is eternally born anew, 
eternally more beautiful, by the divine sophia; and what 
the earth offers in art is but a faint recollection of para- 
dise, as when the ragged kidnaped child of a king tries 
to build with the clay and mud of the streets a copy of 



96 THB BIBLE THB WORD OP GOD. 

the palace of which it faintly recollects that it was once 
its home. Would you have beauty ? Why should heaven 
not be beautiful? The beautiful is the reflection of the 
true; and there is no untruth in heaven. Would you 
have power ? As conqueror you shall be permitted to sit 
with Christ in His throne, even as He also overcame 
and is set down with His Father in His throne. Then 
you shall be permitted to rule the nations with a rod of 
iron, and break them to shivers as the vessels of a potter. 
But that for which we all sigh here below is, that we 
might be sound, potent egos, no longer crippled in the 
veil of clay ; egos with true senses, grasping the forces of 
the universe; yea, containing them in ourselves, centers 
and suns of light and of power. We would be kings of 
the elements and their forces, no longer their timid 
slaves; toward this our endeavors tend more than ever, 
and we boast of having subjugated time and space, force 
and matter. But we deceive ourselves ; and terrible rail- 
road disasters, the sinking of the largest and best 
equipped steamers, devastating storms, earthquakes, and 
volcanic eruptions, teach us very plainly how impotent 
we are over against these forces of nature. Here, too, 
the Bible promises us the full gratification of this hunger. 
Behold our firstborn brother, of whom it is said, "We 
shall be like him ;" "who shall change our vile body, that 
it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body." Thus 
we shall stand and walk upon the new earth, clothed with 
a white garment, girt with a golden girdle; our head 
and our hairs white like wool, as white as snow; our 
eyes as a flame of fire; our feet like unto fine brass, as if 
they burned in a furnace ; our voice as the sound of many 
waters, and our countenance as the sun shineth in his 



THB BIBLB. 97 

strength. (Rev. i, 13-16.) From this glorious being to 
which we shall be resurrected follows the glory of the 
entire creation surrounding us there, and of our entire 
existence. 

A well-known rationalist, whom friends would have 
comforted on his death-bed with prospects of heaven, 
answered, "The conditions for existence here I know; 
the conditions for existence yonder I do not know." All 
his science had not taught the poor man that the condi- 
tions for our existence are in ourselves. God created 
man in His own image, and animated him with His own 
breath, in order that the law of creation might continually 
radiate from him; and as the soul is eternally the same, 
so the conditions for its existence remain the same, like 
God, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 
This is our sorrow and the result of sin, that the condi- 
tions for our existence are not fully met here. This is 
heaven, that they will be fully and completely met in 
the new earth. Why eyes like flames of fire, if they are 
not to behold the light, glorious forms and gorgeous 
colors? Why a voice like the sound of mighty rushing 
waters, if not in order to speak, to command (for we 
shall be kings), to sing, and to praise? Why a powerful 
arm, if there is nothing in yonder world that can be 
grasped ? Why feet, if not for walking ? But how void 
of logic, of connection, of reality, are the heavenly con- 
ceptions of so many Christians ! For the devil whispers 
to them that the divine is only spiritual; that these are 
psychic conditions and sensibilities; one must guard 
against conceiving them grossly sensuous. Thus he 
successfully smothers the glimmering fire of our longings 
for eternal joy. But he is a liar from the beginning. 
7 



98 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

The more divine, the more true and real. God's Word 
does not deceive us with mere likenesses of inconceivable 
things. And as Job exclaims with confiding faith, "Mine 
eyes shall behold Him," so the Christian says: With 
these my hands I shall pluck luscious, strengthening, 
nourishing fruit, and shall eat them with this my mouth. 
(Rev. xxii, 2.) Did Christ not promise His disciples that 
they should ''eat and drink at His table in His kingdom?" 
Did He not say, in taking leave of them, "I will not drink 
henceforth of this fruit of the vine until that day when 
I drink it new with you in My Father's kingdom?" And 
in His glorified body He partook of earthly food before 
His disciples and with them, in order to prove to them 
in fact the reality of the heavenly life. Does he not 
promise us, ''In My Father's house are many mansions ?" 
How does it occur to some Christians to teach that the 
heavenly life is something inconceivable, in which we 
shall float about like mere thoughts, having no relation 
to space and time, therefore invisible and without form 
or fashion — for form and visibility are phenomena of 
space! If this is true, then why rise again from the 
dead? We shall some day marvel at how natural, how 
simple, how human heaven is, and yet how unspeakably 
glorious and blissful is this sinless, heavenly nature and 
new earth, upon which we shall walk as kings and priests 
throughout eternities. 

Still more intense, but fully answering the outward 
conditions of existence above, is the immutable longing, 
hungering, and thirsting of the soul after righteousness, 
peace, joy, and love. That these higher conditions of 
our existence are not fulfilled here below, is also our 
fault, and a source of sorrow to us. That they are ful- 



THE BIBLE. 99 

filled on the new earth, is heaven also. There for the 
first time they will be fulfilled in us and by us, and enrap- 
tured we shall find, in looking upon ourselves, that we 
stand washed clean from every spot and blemish. The 
blessed will practice righteousness in the measure in 
which God gives them righteousness. They will give 
peace in the measure in which they have peace in them- 
selves; they will be loved in the measure in which they 
love. The conditions of your heavenly life lie within you. 
Thus the heavenly existence, simple, real, and unspeaka- 
bly glorious, arises quite naturally and yet grandly from 
the fundamental laws and through the fundamental 
forces which the Divine Lord in the beginning spake 
into the divine creation. 

He who with firm faith lays hold on these Biblical 
ideals, w^hich have been anticipated, even though shadowy, 
by all poets, will be kept from striving after false ideals. 
Because we believe so little in the absolute reality, tangi- 
bility, and naturalness of heavenly possessions, we cling 
so much to earthly possessions, and are so deeply grieved 
if we lose them; and that these beautiful truths are not 
laid hold upon, is the cause of the undecided spiritual 
life of so many Christians, and hinders them from beau- 
tifying materially and intellectually the world about 
them. A prosaic, tedious Christian, to whom questions 
of earthly existence, of habitation and remuneration, of 
social convention and customs, are tragic ; in whom noth- 
ing can be noticed of that divine humor, that divine light- 
mindedness, the anticipation and reflection of the joys of 
eternity, which pleases so much in Luther, CEtinger, 
Oberlin, Dr. Barth, or Father Stilling, is not yet a free 
Christian. All truly wise and great minds have ever felt 



L. of C. 



lOO THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD. 

how little earthly knowledge and earthly riches, indus- 
try or commerce, social progress, or other idols worshiped 
by the masses, can truly satisfy man; and this fact also 
appears from the insanity and suicide of many who are 
favored by fortune, but worship these idols. Man must 
have ideals; the only question is, Where does he seek 
them? We Christians seek our ideals, not in the dust, 
but in the sky; not temporal, but eternal. For even the 
worldly man admits that ideals are things never to be 
reached in this world. But every man's heart tells him 
that there are eternal and heavenly ideals. We believe 
in a God who will some day take away all sorrow; in a 
world wherein righteousness shall dwell; in a fulfillment 
of all our desires ; in a satiation of all our hungering and 
thirsting. We can wait ; the world can not. 

The sons of Belial ridicule the first book of the Bible 
as childish legends; the last book they call phantasies 
of an ecstatic fanatic, and the shining figure between 
they do not see at all. ''For their eyes are holden that 
they do not know Him." But we, whose eyes have been 
opened, look amazed upon the grand unity and the mag- 
nificent harmony of this wonderful book. It contains 
all kinds of episodes and digressions; it lingers and fol- 
lows winding paths; and yet the way is straight, does 
not turn aside to the right or to the left, and with divine 
precision leads directly to the goal. And the end finds 
again the beginning. Eternally the same trees of life 
grow, under which Adam and Eve walked; trees of life 
never wither and dry up; and crystal rivers flow. No 
longer, however, man, naked and in childlike innocence, 
tills the garden, but kings and priests in shining robes 
pass in and out at the pearly gates and the gigantic 



THE BIBLE, loi 

golden palaces of the City of God. That is the gain, 
the reward of the labors and burdens of the week of 
earthly life; and now their guilt is a vanished dream of 
Lucifer, a brief episode between two eternities, forgotten 
in eternal bliss. 

Thus the Scriptures are a gigantic structure, so sim- 
ple that the poorest in intellect is gladdened by its sight, 
and so wonderfully executed that the greatest human 
mind can not cease admiring it. And all this is presented 
so unaffectedly, so naturally, and with such freedom, 
that at first one does not notice its immense grandeur, 
and yet with a destructive, unmerciful logic and inflexi- 
ble consistency not equaled in any book ever written by 
man. Like a rock it stands, and will stand as long as 
the earth lasts. 



But here unbelief asks: What proof have you that 
the Bible is the Word of God? Proof? Does the Bible 
need such? No. Does it attempt to prove? No. 
Proofs, especially rhetorical and rational proofs, are 
crutches; point to something that was assumed to be 
proved, but examined more closely is in need of proof 
itself. The Bible is not in need of proof ; for it does not 
treat of that which is relative, but establishes that which 
is absolute. The relative must be proved, the absolute 
not. "In the beginning God created." Believe it, or do 
not believe it. "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant 
of sin." If this must still be proved to you, you are a 
hopeless case. You have no eyes for immediate truth; 
you are not fit for heaven, where proofs are no longer 
given. The Bible does not operate by means of critical. 



I02 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

scientific, philosophical, or theological proofs. Of the 
thousands among the poor, the uneducated, and the ig- 
norant, who believed the Bible and were saved by it, 
scarcely one in a hundred had ever heard of such proofs, 
or of proofs for or against the Bible at all. The Word 
of God influenced their hearts directly, and the Spirit 
of God witnessed with their spirit that they were chil- 
dren of God ; that was enough for them. 

It is a spiritually indigent generation that is ever 
crying for proofs. Have you proofs that the sun shines 
and the stars twinkle, that the rose is fragrant and bread 
nourishes you, that love refreshes your soul and hatred 
grieves it? Can that which is grandest and loftiest, best 
and most beautiful in the world be proved? Believers, 
too, attach too much weight to critical proofs; e. g., 
when the genuineness of the Gospel of John is to be 
proved by quoting Clement of Alexandria or Irenseus of 
Lyons. For who will prove to me from other "sources" 
the genuineness and authenticity of these quotations, and 
who will prove the genuineness of these "sources," etc. ? 
How little is gained from such proofs appears from the 
fact that scholarly theologians, like Professor Harnack, 
do not believe them. Thus another critic of Irenaeus 
writes : The testimony of this man, "who claims to have 
stood in immediate contact with the Apostle John," that 
John wrote the Book of Revelation, "is worthless, be- 
cause he also ascribes the fourth Gospel to the same 
apostle." Thus even venerable but displeasing sources 
can be questioned and rejected. He whose faith rests 
upon such arguments will constantly be wavering be- 
tween arguments and counter-arguments. Therefore we 
prefer to open the Book, and taste spiritually; then we 



THB BIBLB. 103 

are convinced, not only of its genuineness, but also of its 
divinity. At the teachings of Jesus our soul rejoicingly 
exclaims, "Never man spake like this man! These are 
the words of eternal life !" Then we know that the tes- 
timony of this disciple is true (John xxi, 24) ; for God 
does not give such words to a falsifier or a defrauder. 

That which is true is constantly proved by its mere 
existence, — fire by its burning, water by its flowing, the 
sun by its lighting and warming. So the Bible, this 
divine light, this water of life, this spiritual sun, the rays 
of which bring healing. It has ever proved to friend and 
foe to be the power of God that saves and condemns ; a 
rock, to which one can flee and be sheltered from the 
storms and the raging waters, and on which whosoever 
shall fall shall be broken. 

The divinity of God's Word can be demonstrated as 
little as God Himself. But as the Christian neverthe- 
less is justified in pointing out his God in creation; in 
admiring and showing to others His greatness. His wis- 
dom, and His power; so he is also justified in recogniz- 
ing and praising the glory and power of the Bible in the 
history of the human race, without attempting to demon- 
strate them. There its truth shines forth in the destinies 
both of nations and of individuals. 

The Bible further distinguishes itself from all so- 
called "sacred books" of all nations in that it knows and 
shows things that are to come. Where is there a book 
written by man that has dared to predict positively the 
destinies of its own people for the space of a century to 
come, to say nothing of predicting the destinies of other 
peoples and kingdoms, their rise and fall during thou- 
sands of years? "Who, as I," says Jehovah, "shall call, 



I04 THE BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

and shall declare it, and set it in order for Me, since I 
appointed the ancient people? And the things that are 
coming, and shall come, let them show unto them." 
(Isa. xliv, 7.) "I declare the end from the beginning, 
and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, 
saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my 
pleasure." (Isa. xlvi, 10.) 

As in the Old Testament the Israelitish nation, and in 
the New Testament its scion Christ, are the central points 
in the respective views of the world, so these prophecies 
pertain to all nations whose history is bound up with the 
history of Israel. Thus Moab and Ammon shall be vis- 
ited with retribution for their years of enmity. Where 
are they now ? And of Idumea it was repeatedly spoken : 
"Thou shalt be desolate, O mount Seir, and all Idumea, 
even all of it." (Ezek. xxxv, 3, 4, 15.) The atheist 
Volney was the first to report that during a journey of 
eight days he had there found thirty ruined, utterly aban- 
doned cities. ''There shall not be any remaining of the 
house of Esau." (Obad. 18.) Where is the people of 
Edom to-day ? "O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the 
rock, that boldest the height of the hill : though thou 
shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring 
thee down from thence, saith the Lord." (Jer. xlix, 16.) 
God has snatched the proud inhabitants of the now deso- 
late rocky palaces of Petra out of their nest, and has cast 
them down. 

Concerning Canaanitish Sidon and Tyre, from which 
under Jezebel the abomination of Baal had in great 
measure been transplanted to Israel, the prophet an- 
nounces : "I will make thee like the top of a rock ; thou 
shalt be a place to spread nets upon; thou shall be built 



THE BIBLE. 105 

no more." Lamartine {Voyage en Orient), among 
others, wonders at how Hterally this prophecy has been 
fulfilled. Continental Tyre has not been built again. It 
was threatened: The Lord "will scrape her dust from 
her, and make her like the top of a rock." (Ezek. xxvi, 
4.) "They [thine enemies] shall lay thy stones and thy 
timber and thy dust in the midst of the water." (Ezek. 
xxvi, 12.) Two and a half centuries later Alexander the 
Great besieged Tyre, and decided to build a dam a half 
mile long between the main land and the island ; for this 
purpose the walls and doors, the palaces and temples of 
the old city were torn down, and the stones and timbers, 
yea, even the dust, were thrown from their places into 
the sea. 

Equally definite are the prophecies again Egypt, "the 
iron furnace," in which the children of Israel groaned 
so many years. Likewise against No, or Thebes. "No 
shall be torn asunder," Ezekiel said five hundred years 
before Ptolemy Saltyrus, the grandfather of Cleopatra, 
after a siege of three years, razed to the ground the city, 
which had previously been half ruined by Cambyses. 
Even Strabo (25 B. C.) found the once magnificent city 
divided into many separate villages. To-day there are 
nine of these. How often it is predicted that the rivers 
and canals of Egypt shall dry up, that their fishermen 
shall grow poor, and that the land shall be desolate; and 
how has this been fulfilled! Where are the fisheries of 
Lake Moeris, which are said to have yielded the Pharaohs 
an annual income of 1,800,000 marks? Indeed, Egypt 
has come to be "the land of ruins," and "its cities are in 
the midst of cities that are wasted." (Ezek. xxx, 7.) 
Truly, God has "made waste" the land "by the hand of 



io6 THB BIBLB THB WORD OP GOD, 

strangers" (Ezek. xxx, 12), from Cambyses and Amroo 
and Ochus down to the Turk of to-day. "There shall 
be no more a prince of the land of Egypt." (Ezek. xxx, 
13.) But the Egyptians shall not be wholly exterminated, 
like the Babylonians and Ninevites. ''It shall be (in its 
own land) the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it 
exalt itself any more above the nations." How true this 
also is of the once so proud and powerful nation ; now an 
insignificant kingdom, ruled by strangers! 

But the chief enemies of Israel were Assyria and 
Babylonia. The downfall of these two proud powers is 
prophesied; and never has the downfall of an empire 
been more complete. Their land was a granary, a bloom- 
ing garden carefully watered by canals, so fruitful, that 
Herodotus feared he would be accused of lying if he 
related what he had seen : that a grain of wheat bore two 
hundred to three hundred fold, and that many ears were 
of the width of four fingers. How incredible that such 
a land, swarming with highly civilized inhabitants, sho-uld 
be converted into a desolate, seared, wholly unproductive 
and uninhabited desert ! How could it come about ? For 
such a thing has never taken place in Europe, China, or 
India. But the Lord said through the prophet, "Her 
cities shall be a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, 
a land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son 
of man pass thereby." And it is a desert. Of this land 
the traveler Eraser says, "The entire plain is densely 
covered with traces of former habitations, but now offers 
the eye nothing but an immense barren desert, a melan- 
choly waste." And Ker Porter says, "Every bit of 
ground, as far as the eye could reach, was wholly unpro- 
ductive." Investigators, who travel in these countries. 



THB BIBLE. ^^7 

marvel at the disappearance of such powerful civiliza- 
tions. Even the infidel Volney describes these ruins and 
deserts in words that often seem to be taken from the 
prophets, so minutely does fulfillment agree with 
prophecy. 

How utterly improbable it must have sounded, to the 
contemporaries of Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the great 
Babylon, this oldest metropolis of the world, founded by 
Nimrod, planned to be a city on the Euphrates much 
larger than Paris of to-day (J. Menant), surrounded by 
walls four hundred feet high, on the top of which four 
chariots, each drawn by four horses, could be driven side 
by side; in the center a large, magnificent park an hour's 
walk in circumference, watered by machinery; in it the 
king's twelve palaces, surrounding the great temple of the 
sun-god with its six hundred-foot tower and its gigantic 
golden statue, — should be converted into a heap of ruins 
in the midst of a desert! Who to-day would have any 
faith in a similar prophecy against Berlin or London or 
Paris or New York ? But thus saith the prophet concern- 
ing Babylon : "It shall never be inhabited, neither shall 
it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither 
shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shep- 
herds make their folds there. But wild beasts of the 
desert shall lie there ; and their houses shall be full of 
doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs 
shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands 
shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their 
pleasant palaces." (Isa. xiii, 20-22.) "I will make thee 
a burnt mountain" (Jer. li, 25) ; "Babylon shall become 
heaps." (ver. 37.) It has been done. In the desert 
plain on the Euphrates there rises, stretching afar, a 



io8 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

mountain of brick, partly burnt and half vitrified; the 
Arabs call it Birs Nimrud, the tower of Nimrod. Of 
this Porter reports, 'Its hiding-places are inhabited by 
lions, three of which were quietly sunning themselves, 
when I drew near." Keppel says, "Owls fly out of the 
sparse thickets, and the loathsome jackal creeps in its 
furrows." On the ruins of Babylon the Arab neither 
pitches his tent, nor herds his flocks ; for the entire place 
is reported to be the habitation of evil spirits ; and Arabs 
could not be hired to spend the night there. 

Great Babylon, the city of Baal, fought against Jeru- 
salem, the city of Jehovah, a giant against a dwarf. But 
Babylon and its people have disappeared like a dream 
in the morning, and Jerusalem and its inexterminable 
people still stand; for thus hath Jehovah spoken. And 
some day, when all the Babylons of the world, in which 
lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, and the pride of life 
reign, pass away with the old earth, a gigantic golden 
city of peace, the new and true Jerusalem shall descend 
upon the new earth in fullness of blinding light. 

It would require whole chapters to quote the prophe- 
cies concerning Israel. Every Bible reader knows them, 
and knows how, fifteen hundred years before, the pow- 
erful .prophet, who spoke face to face with God, set a 
blessing and a curse before this people. (Deut. xxviii.) 
It chose the curse. Will any one deny that this nation, 
torn from its hereditary land, has been and still is cast 
among all nations? In accordance with prophecy, hated, 
persecuted, despised as no other nation, and yet inexter- 
minable, it nurtures in its heart the hope of returning 
some day to Jerusalem. How strikingly, in the long, oft- 
times terrible persecutions of the Jews, the threat has 



THE BIBLE, 109 

been fulfilled: "The Lord shall scatter thee among all 
people. And among these nations shalt thou find no 
ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest; but the 
IvOrd shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing 
of eyes, and sorrow of mind. And thy life shall hang in 
doubt before thee." (Deut. xxviii, 64-66.) 

Very minutely Moses announces to the Jews their 
downfall at the hands of the Roman nation : "The Lord 
shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end 
of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth" — as is well 
known, the eagle was the standard of the Roman legions 
— "a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand" — 
the Jews knew and understood many Oriental languages, 
but not the Latin — "a nation of fierce countenance" — how 
striking ! — "which shall not regard the person of the old, 
nor show favor to the young." (Deut. xxviii, 49, 50.) 
It is reported that when the Romans took the Jewish 
cities, although they had promised to spare the lives of 
the inhabitants, they_killed the aged and the children, 
because they were unfit to serve as slaves. Again the 
seer says: "And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, 
until thy high and fenced walls come down, wherein 
thou trustedst, throughout all thy land." (Deut. xxviii, 
52.) The high and fenced walls of Jerusalem, says an 
eye-witness, were joined so exactly of huge blocks of 
stone that they seemed to be a single rock. But Josephus 
describes how the Romans beat against these walls and 
towers with immense battering rams, the iron heads of 
which weighed many hundredweight, until they fell in 
ruins. High above the Dead Sea towered the rocky fort- 
ress of Herod, filled with stores of all kinds, and consid- 
ered impregnable. But month after month the Romans 



no THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

dug paths into the rock, carried up stone after stone, in 
spite of all opposition built a tower higher than the 
fortress, took the fortress, and killed the garrison. It 
had been prophesied, that during this siege the Jews 
should suffer a most terrible famine. Both the tender 
man and "the tender and delicate woman among you, 
which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot 
upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, shall 
eat their children, and will not give to any of their own 
of the flesh of their children, for want of all things in 
the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall 
distress thee in thy gates." (Deut. xxviii, 54-57.) This 
terrible prophecy also was literally fulfilled during the 
siege of Jerusalem, and later during the Middle Ages. 
Finally the prophet threatens, *'The Lord shall bring thee 
into Egypt again with ships; and there ye shall be sold 
unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and 
no man shall buy you.'' (Deut. xxviii, 68.) Josephus 
reports that, after the destruction of Jerusalem and the 
invasion of Palestine, all Jews over seventeen years of 
age, many thousands, were brought to Egypt in ships, 
in order to be sold there as slaves. The market was so 
glutted that finally a Jew was bartered for a pair of slip- 
pers. At last no one zvould buy, and three thousand Jew- 
ish slaves were left to starve to death. 

Later various prophets repeatedly announced to the 
rebellious, muttering nation why it was chastised by 
God, and what the king of Babylon would do with it 
and its kings; that for seventy years they would be held 
captive in Babylon, and Jerusalem be deserted ; how, after 
that, a king not yet born, of the name of Cyrus, should 
receive command to rebuild the temple; how later they 



THB BIBLE. m 

should be scattered throughout the world, a mockery to 
all nations, and yet should not be destroyed. Is not "the 
land of beauty" now a land of ruins, and do not ''its 
cities lie desolate?" And it is also a land of pilgrimages. 
"The stranger that shall come from a far land, and all 
nations shall say. Wherefore hath the Lord done thus 
unto this land?" (Deut. xxix, 22, 24.) The faithful 
pilgrim, too, and the stupidly gaping crowds of modern 
heathen from far away lands, who annually pour into 
Palestine and trample upon the holy city, and, void of 
understanding, look upon the Jews who weep at the walls 
of their temple, ask astonished : How has the land come 
to be thus destroyed, and how have its cities become so 
desolate ? 

But because God is faithful and merciful, the prophe- 
cies close with words of peace and comfort, with great 
promises of how the God who scattered Israel will gather 
it again, and will keep what he promised Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob. "Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the 
Lord, that it shall no more be said. The Lord liveth, that 
brought up the children of Israel out of the land of 
Egypt; but, The Lord liveth, that brought up the chil- 
dren of Israel from the land of the north, and from all 
the lands whither he had driven them; and I will bring 
them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers." 
(Jer. xvi, 14, 15. See also Ezek. xi, 16-20.) It was 
an easy thing for God to convert the flourishing country 
on the Euphrates into a desert, and to destroy its people. 
Why should it be a more difficult thing for him to con- 
vert the present desert of Palestine into a flourishing gar- 
den full of springs of water, and give it back again to his 
people ? No ; the arm of the Lord is not shortened, even 



112 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

though many unbelievers and many who are weak in the 
faith still exclaim mockingly or doubtingly, "How shall 
this be?" 

For the time of the present casting away of Israel, 
during which Christ is gathering an invisible Church 
out of all nations and tongues, prophecy is silent con- 
cerning this people, from which God has for the time 
being turned away his face; but this break in the world's 
history is filled out by the Prophet Daniel, living in exile 
on the Euphrates. 

In great visions of God the four empires that fill out 
the time of the nations are shown simultaneously to 
mighty Nebuchadnezzar and to mourning Daniel. (Dan. 
ii and vii.) In magnificent symbolism the great ruler 
sees them, like unto a statue, terrible to behold; but the 
prophet sees them, like unto wild beasts, rising out of the 
sea of nations. Every one versed in history knows how 
strikingly the Babylonian lion and the golden head (Dan. 
iii, i), the bear from the mountains of Media, and the 
silver, and the winged, four-headed leopard correspond 
to the swift conqueror Alexander, his mailed phalanxes, 
and his four successors; and how the fourth, strong as 
iron, like a terrible, all-devouring beast, corresponds to 
Rome. 

Only a mean, superficial conception of the world's 
history and of prophecy can take the fourth kingdom to 
be that of Antiochus Epiphanes, which was utterly in- 
significant in strength, greatness, duration, and influence; 
and this little tyrant, mockingly surnamed Epimanes 
("the mad"), ill suits to the towering forms of Nebu- 
chadnezzar, Cyrus, Alexander, and Caesar. He was no 
world-power; he did not break in pieces and stamp with 



THH BIBLE. "3 

his feet the nations; he did not devour the whole earth; 
from him there did not arise ten kingdoms (Dan. vii, 23) ; 
in his day God did not estabhsh an eternal kingdom. 
(Dan. ii, zi4; vii, 22, 27.) 

But that Rome was "iron" and "broke in pieces" 
everything, is recognized by historians like Niebuhr, 
Mommsen, Guizot, and others, and is often expressed by 
them in the very same terms. Now, as it is prophesied, 
clay has been mixed with the iron — i. e., a spiritual em- 
pire — which for Nebuchadnezzar, who beholds the great 
image, is clay, and no longer metal. "But there shall be 
in it of the strength of the iron." (Dan. ii, 41.) With 
a residue of worldly power, in constant strife with its 
anointed so-called Roman emperors from Charles the 
Great to Napoleon I, Rome in the Middle Ages ruled 
over kings and nations with an iron rod, and persecuted 
the Christians; Rome still speaks the Latin language, 
and with legions of well-disciplined priests controls 
various nations and more than three million subjects, and 
in the Eternal City its head still wears the threefold 
crown. Europe's administration of justice is still based 
on Roman law^ and its culture on the Roman language. 
In the near future the fourth kingdom, apparently mor- 
tally wounded, and separated into ten kingdoms, corre- 
sponding to the ten horns and the ten toes, will rise again 
under the reign of the Anti-Christ. ( Rev. xiii, 3 ; xvil, 
8.) Then Christ, the stone cut out without hands, will 
shatter this kingdom and all the kingdoms of earth, and 
will establish His own kingdom, which shall endure 
forever. 

But the center of prophecy, as well as of the Scrip- 
tures, is Christ, announced at the beginning of the world's 
8 



114 THB BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

history as He who shall bruise the serpent's head; at 
the close of the world's history, as He who shall come 
again. Here, too, we can not cite all prophecies pertain- 
ing to Him. For him, whose "understanding He opens, 
that he might understand the Scriptures" (Luke xxiv, 
45), the Bible is full of them, and Christ Himself re- 
peatedly witnesses, "Moses and the Psalms and the 
prophets have spoken of Me." And His servants have 
represented Him as prevenient types. Such were Melchiz- 
edek, the priest of the Most High; Isaac, selected by 
God to be a guiltless sacrifice at the hands of his father ; 
Joseph, who, being innocent, is sold by his brothers for 
twenty pieces of silver, and to whom God subsequently 
gives dominion; Moses, who leads his people through 
the Red Sea, and gives them the law ; Joshua, who leads 
them into the promised land ; David, chosen by God to be 
anointed king of Israel; Solomon's reign and his king- 
dom of peace, with the building of the temple, a type of 
Christ's millennium on earth. Nor is there any lack of 
more definite prophecy, beginning with the great promise 
given to Abraham, that in him all nations of the earth 
should be blest. "Abraham rejoiced to see His day." 
Isaiah sees His glory, and rejoices, "Unto us a Child is 
born, and His name shall be called Wonderful, the ever- 
lasting Father, the Prince of Peace;" he sees His humil- 
ity, and says : "Surely He hath borne our griefs and car- 
ried our sorrows. The chastisement of our peace was 
upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed." 

Shall we cite further prophecies? This Messiah was 
to be a Jew, a son of David. He was to be born in Beth- 
lehem; to come in lowliness and poverty; to be rejected 
by Israel; to enter Jerusalem riding on an ass; to be be- 



THB BIB LB. 115 

trayed by one who ate bread with Him; to be sold for 
thirty pieces of silver, and the money to be given to the 
potter; to die a violent death, the manner and the cir- 
cumstances of which were predicted. "I hid not My 
face from shame and spitting." ''They pierced My hands 
and My feet." ''In My thirst they gave Me vinegar to 
drink." "They part My garments among them, and 
cast lots upon My vesture." "All they that see Me laugh 
Me to scorn; they shake the head, saying: He trusted 
on the Lord that He would deliver Him ; let Him deliver 
Him, seeing He delighteth in Him." He was to make 
His grave with the rich in His death. These are prophe- 
cies written centuries before Christ came. Have they not 
been fulfilled literally? "O fools, and slow of heart to 
believe all that the prophets have spoken!" (Luke xxiv, 
25.) These words might to-day be addressed to such 
as, blind to such testimony, see nothing more in Jesus 
than a superior Jewish teacher. 

Finally the Bible closes with prophecies pertaining 
to the last things. Concluding the seven consecutive 
Churches, Laodicea, "the judgment of the nations," ap- 
pears, and the judgments of the end begin. 

He whose eyes and ears have been opened by the 
Spirit of God can not escape the impression, shared even 
by godless persons, that we are drifting toward the end. 
The principles are manifest. Despite all pride and boast- 
ings, the human race is quite tired of its works and ways 
on earth, and no longer knows what to love, what to be- 
lieve, and what to hope. It has emptied the cup, and 
the dregs taste bitter. God can again say, as He said 
previous to the flood: "My Spirit shall not always strive 
with man, for that he also is flesh." (Die Menschen 



ii6 THB BIB LB THB WORD OF GOD. 

wollen sich nicht mehr von meinem Geist strafen lassen, 
denn sie sind Pleisch/') No other kingdom arises after 
the fourth. God will then establish His eternal kingdom. 

Thus the Bible is the Book of Prophecy, given by 
inspiration of Him who alone knows the things that are 
future, and will accomplish them according to His eternal 
counsel. 

And this, too, is an anticipation and a beginning of 
the end, that long-forgotten peoples are being resurrected 
from their graves. The stone age and the lake-dwellings 
{Pfahlbauten) , the graves of the Huns and the Troys and 
Mycenses, the palaces of Khorsabad and Nineveh, the 
hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform writings of 
Babylon, give up their dead. Christ's words are being 
fulfilled : "If these [the children of the kingdom] should 
hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out." 
(Luke xix, 40.) These ruins and writings of very an- 
cient times proclaim aloud that the Bible tells the truth. 
Thus the well-known Assyriologist, Professor Sayce, of 
Oxford, writes, "I do not for a moment hesitate to as- 
sert that, according to my knowledge, the investigations 
in Assyria and Egypt thoroughly corroborate the state- 
ments of the Old Testament."* 

It was to be expected that a science hostile to the 
Bible would attempt to use these discoveries against it. 
If from the beginning the traditions of those nations were 
different from the Bible traditions, science would have 
said, *'The Bible contains only specifically Jewish legends, 
which are fabrications of Israelitish priests." And now, 
that the grand harmony between the Biblical reports and 
the beliefs of all nations concerning creation, paradise. 



*From the German reudering of the original. 



THB BIBLE. 117 

the fall of man, and the flood is more and more apparent, 
shall we believe the distorted traditions of Babel, the city 
of confounded human language, rather than the Biblical 
reports? And shall we consider these legends of 
wretched, contentious, unclean deities, who, "fat and 
drunken with feasting," "fall like flies upon him who is 
offering sacrifice," thus causing strife between gods and 
goddesses, to be the "much purer and more original 
source" from which the monumental report of the doings 
of a holy and righteous God has originated? Never- 
more! "What agreement hath the temple of God with 
idols?" (2 Cor. vi, 16.) Where, in all this seemingly 
sublime idol-w^orship, is there even an approach to the 
first, greatest, all-illuminating command of the Bible, 
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind?" And 
where in its much lauded code of morals the second, 
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself?" Here is a 
gulf, as wide as between the former and the present char- 
acter of Babel and its children, and the character of the 
Bible and its believers. 

The well-known Berlin lecture of Professor Delitzsch 
on "Babel and Bible" is a melancholy picture. On the 
one hand, bold, in part contradictory assertions, refuted 
in the Congress of Orientalists, in Hamburg, by Hil- 
precht, Sayce, Hommel; premature conclusions and de- 
signing inferences, presented in a declamatory manner, 
with utter lack of an understanding of the Bible; on the 
other hand, a credulous admiring and accepting of things, 
of which what is new is for the greater part not true, and 
what is true is not new ; finally, faint-hearted refutations, 
which did not touch the real essence of the matter. The 



ii8 THB BIBLE THB WORD OF GOD. 

Bible teaches that all peoples are descended from Noah 
and his sons ; therefore they were originally monotheists, 
and many remained so, even though gradually all kinds 
of nether gods were introduced. Such monotheistic peo- 
ples were the Egyptians and Celts, the Polynesians, and 
the North American Indians; also the Slavs, of whom 
the historian Prokop reports, ^'They do indeed pray to 
rivers, nymphs, and a number of other deities ; neverthe- 
less they believe in one God of gods, sole Lord of all, 
who intrusts the administration of the affairs of this 
world to these nether gods, whom He created, and occu- 
pies Himself exclusively with heavenly affairs." (It is 
frequently true, even among some European nations, that 
single cities, or even individual persons, have their par- 
ticular nether god or saint.) Whether the Babylonians 
at a certain time were chiefly monotheists or polytheists, 
and how they named their deities, what bearing have 
these things on the question whether the Bible is a revela- 
tion or not ? The battle of Marduk with the dragon, the 
worship of the moon tablets of clay with problematic 
representations of the fall of man, or the report of the 
Gilgameshepos concerning the flood, — these distorted re- 
mains of a primal revelation, which are found among so 
many Asiatic and American peoples, — what have these 
to do with the truth of the Bible? What has the now 
translated Codex of Hammurabi or Amraphel (Gen. xiv, 
i) — in which Dr. Jeremias, contrary to the assertions 
of Delitzsch, says "not a single religious thought can be 
discovered" — in common with the law of Sinai? What 
have Assyriological corroborations of the history of Abra- 
ham, the truth of which it never occurred to us to doubt, 
to do with his call and the command, "Get thee out of thy 



THE BIBLE. "9 

country, and from thy kindred," and with the promise, 
''In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed,'' or 
with his faith in this promise, which was counted unto 
him for righteousness? What to us who believe the 
Bible, and to whom the Word of God is immeasurably 
higher than the word of men, is this groping about in his- 
toric surmises and secondary matters? 

Evil spirits are said to be originally a Babylonian 
idea, and the conception of "angels" and "cherubim" to 
have originated from the couriers and the body-guard of 
the Assyrian kings. A well-known periodical rejoices 
that "new and surprising light is thrown upon the origin 
of the Jewish conceptions of hell and paradise" by a clay 
cylinder, bearing the inscription, "Whoever leaves this 
coffin at his threshold, may his name be blessed above, 
and his soul drink clear water below !" After all, noth- 
ing can surpass critical science and the faith of its disci- 
ples. At last we know why for six thousand years the 
whole human race from pole to pole, four hundred mil- 
lion Chinese and one hundred and eighty million Hindoos, 
the Japanese and the Mexicans, the Esquimos and the 
Hottentots, the Negroes and the Mongolians, and w^e 
Europeans, too, have believed in good and evil spirits, in 
angels and demons, in heaven and hell. These are all 
Assyrian notions ! 

Not less surprising, though no longer new, is the 
report, that the legend of a flood and the rescue of two 
persons in a great ship, contained in the traditions of all 
peoples of the earth, of the Inkas of Peru, and the inhab- 
itants of the Sandwich Islands, originated from a cyclone 
in the Persian Gulf ! Why did not an earthquake in Asia 
Minor give rise among all nations of the earth to the 



120 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

legend of a universal earthquake that destroyed all man- 
kind? Such unproved and unprovable things a highly 
educated public accepts at once as sober science — a public, 
proud of living in the age of rigidly-examining criticism. 
There are persons who seem to feel a constant need of 
minimizing that which is great, of degrading that which 
is sublime, of vulgarizing that which is holy. For such I 
would here add, that I remember having read that a tribe 
of Negroes in Africa relates how their wives at one time, 
wishing to emancipate themselves, had resolved to build 
a tower as high as the heavens, and to this end had piled 
up their millet baskets, but that a storm had blown the 
structure down. Ought we not to consider this the purer 
primal legend, from which subsequently the story of the 
building of the tower of Babel originated? 

Proofs taken from archaeology, however agreeable 
they may be to him whose faith wavers, have only second- 
ary value for the Christian who has faith in the Bible; 
nor do we read that many learned Assyriologists and 
Egyptologists, or many scholars in general, have turned 
to God in consequence of these discoveries that agree with 
the Bible. Here, too, modern man is too forcibly im- 
pressed with the new and the sensational. Without 
Assyriology the Bible has for thousands of years been 
the Word of God to millions, and it wall remain so in the 
future, with or in spite of Assyriology. Whoever, as 
Professor Delitzsch does, expects "from the results of 
Assyriology an essential contribution for a necessary de- 
velopment of religion," shows that he does not know 
what religion, much less what Christianity is ; and who- 
ever must dig in Assyriology for proofs and supports of 
his faith in the Bible is to be pitied. His faith, not being 



THB BIBLE. 121 

grounded or not resting on ''the power of God," but upon 
the "wisdom of men," will be moved right or left accord- 
ing to every new discovery, or the spirit of every new 
book, report, or lecture, as a reed is moved by the wind. 
More important, more authoritative, and more deci- 
sive for us than Assyriological science is the great, shin- 
ing self -testimony of the Scriptures: I make known 
what is future, and reveal God's plan of the world from 
the beginning of things to their completion. 



The power over the individual human heart, which 
the Bible constantly manifests, is amazing. The fulfill- 
ment of prophecy, however striking it may be, remains a 
historic and general fact, from which I personally re- 
ceive little help in my earthly need. I inquire whether 
there are cases in which this Word of God justified and 
liberated men like me, bowed down by guilt and by earthly 
sorrow, "through fear of death subject to bondage;" 
whether it gave them power to despise and joyously to 
overcome the distress of life and the bitterness of death, 
and whether they remained firm even unto death; for 
"all that a man hath will he give for his life." (Job ii, 
4.) And with millions of facts history answers: Yes, 
the Bible has done this. 

That the Bible is divine is shown by the fierce and 
raging hatred it has at all times kindled in the children of 
the devil. True, men have at all times been persecuted 
and killed for all kinds of views and heresies ; but where 
is there another book, which has been hated with such 
deadly hatred, of which thousands of copies have been 
burned and destroyed, and yet is so widely distributed — 



122 THB BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

a book, the mere possession of which was often equal to 
a death-sentence? Many martyrs were burned on pyres 
of Bibles and New Testaments, or with Bibles hung about 
their necks. Of what importance is the Bible? Is it 
natural that the knowledge of God's having so loved the 
world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoso- 
ever believeth in Him should not perish, but have ever- 
lasting life, should kindle such wrath, or that it should 
be a crime to read, or make known to others, the words 
of Christ, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse 
you?" And yet we know from thousands of authentic 
reports, that the enemies foamed with rage and gnashed 
their teeth when martyrs composedly quoted the Scrip- 
tures to them. 

In fact, the mere and most speedy extermination of 
Christians — e. g., by the sword or by banishment, as the 
Moors were banished from Spain — would have sufficed at 
all times. But the impulse to afflict and torture them as 
long and as cruelly as possible, in order to force them to 
desert or to recant, is characteristic of the personal hatred 
of the persecutors. Besides, it was feared that they might 
promulgate the hated Word, wherefore in Rome their 
tongues were torn out, during the inquisition they were 
silenced, even on the pyres, with iron gags; and in the 
Netherlands, under Alba, their tongues were burned out 
with red-hot rings, before their execution. 

Many historians, to whom Christ and the witness for 
Him is obnoxious, delight in representing these martyrs 
as stubborn fanatics, who challenged persecution by de- 
riding the gods and their cult ; indeed, one historian would 
have us beheve that even dear Nero had only through 
force of circumstances and from political necessity. 



THE BIBLE. 123 

burned a few Christians. True, in those days many mar- 
tyrs even in their witnessing manifested Roman defiance 
and inflexibiHty — a trait which we, alas ! are too much 
in want of; but in the history of martyrdom, covering 
centuries, the feature that fills us with astonishment is 
rather the superhuman meekness and humility with which 
they endured and suffered all things, and with which, 
even on flaming pyres, they forgave their persecutors. 

True, politics played a part in the persecution of 
Christians ; for the devil has ever understood exceedingly 
well how to use our statecraft for his purposes, and to 
deceive us in regard thereto. But politics were not the 
chief cause. It was entirely unpolitic of Philip II, by 
the cruelty of Alba, to excite the Netherlands against 
himself on account of their evangelic faith; and also un- 
politic of Louis XIV to devastate beautiful Languedoc 
by his dragoons, and to drive half a million of his most 
diligent and faithful subjects into exile. But his father- 
confessor and Letellier had told him that he could merit 
heaven only by exterminating the heretics ; this Philip II 
believed, and wrote to the governess of the Netherlands, 
Margaret of Parma, "I would a thousand times rather 
not reign than rule over heretics!" Thus also bloody 
Mary and other persecutors. Christians were not dan- 
gerous to the State, for they preached, 'Xet every soul be 
subject unto the higher powers;" "honor the king;" "re- 
sist not evil." Neither is the testimony for which thou- 
sands suffered death dangerous to the State: "In Jesus 
alone we have forgiveness of sin, and in His Word we 
have all we need in order to be saved." The little chil- 
dren were not dangerous to the State, who without sen- 
tence, were thrown into the fire with their parents ; neither 



124 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

those weak of old age, who had to be carried to the pyre ; 
neither Mrs. Smith, who was burned in 15 19 because she 
had taught her children the Lord's Prayer and the Ten 
Commandments in English; neither the martyr Lambert 
(1538), who, when his legs were already burned to a 
crisp, raised his hands to bless the people, and exclaimed, 
"Jesus only ! Jesus only !" neither the cripple Milon, who 
was slowly roasted to death in Paris, because on his bed 
of pain he had read to the poor from the New Testament ; 
neither young Johanna Waste, blind from her birth, who 
(1556 in England), after pathetic answers before her 
judges, permitted herself to be led by the hand to the pyre, 
where she was cruelly burned to death. But "the world 
hated them ; for they were not of the world." (John xvii, 
14.) Behind these persecutors he who has eyes to see, 
sees the dark, gnashing form of the prince of hell, who 
knows that the Word believed in and proclaimed by these 
people will one day judge him. 

Such terrible persecutions did not take place in the 
name of the Bible, as the opponents of the Bible like to 
maintain; the inquisitors ferreted out and burned even 
this Bible, and such with it as they found possessing or 
distributing it. If misled Christians have ever perse- 
cuted those of different faith, if others like Zwingli and 
Gustavus Adolphus, the Hussites, the Camisards, the 
Puritans, used the sword for the dissemination or main- 
tenance of Biblical truth, they did it contrary to the com- 
mand and the clear example of Christ, therefore not with, 
but against, the Bible; and they perished by the sword, 
because they took the sword. 

These martyrs do not number only a few hundred. 
By thousands and millions they will some day rise again, 



THB BIB LB. 125 

"a great multitude, which no man can number, of all na- 
tions, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, clothed with 
white robes, and palms in their hands ; they came out of 
great tribulation, and made their robes white in the blood 
of the Lamb." Paul, even in his day, could say of the 
martyrs, "Seeing we are compassed about with so great 
a cloud of witnesses;" and in several subsequent great 
persecutions the people and the Roman emperors shed 
the blood of Christians like water. (Concerning this and 
concerning persecutions in general, see Kalb, Die Maer- 
tyrer der alien Kirche; Fliedner, Geschichte der Maer- 
tyrer; Merle d'Aubigne, Historie de la Reformation; 
Crespin, Actes des Martyrs, and other works. ) Thus the 
Christian Legion, the six thousand six hundred men of 
which allowed themselves, without offering resistance, to 
be cut down under Maximus, rather than offer sacrifice to 
the gods. Thus, under Diocletian, a Phrygian city, in- 
habited exclusively by Christians, was surrounded and 
burned with all its inhabitants. Under this emperor the 
butchery lasted seven years. Eusebius says, ''The hang- 
men grew tired, the swords and instruments of torture 
grew dull or were broken;" hundreds of thousands had 
fallen, but constantly others turned to Christianity. 

Then the barbarians invaded the country, and the 
Roman empire perished in blood. We know that multi- 
tudes of Christians also died during this invasion; that, 
e. g., in Gaul and North Africa, entire Christian cities 
were destroyed by Attila and his Huns, by Vandals, 
Avars, and Ostrogoths. Among the Angles and Picts; 
among the wild Germanic tribes {e. g., the Frisians, who 
slew Boniface and his escort) ; among the Britons, Bul- 
garians, and the Hungarians, there were also many mar- 



126 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

tyrs, when courageous apostles proclaimed the truth to 
them. Under the cruel Shapur, or Sapor, of Persia, 
thousands of Christians are said to have been killed. 
Denmark, Sweden, and Russia have also had their mar- 
tyrs. There, too, their blood was the seed of the Church. 

Later, in the thirteenth century, before Luther and 
Calvin, there died for the faith thousands of Waldenses 
and Albigenses (seventy-five thousand of the latter in 
the crusade preached against them), many Hussites, Bo- 
hemians, and Moravians, Wiclifites, and Lollards, in 
England and the Netherlands. And although not all who 
perished {e. g., among the Albigenses and Hussites) 
were true Christians, it must be remembered that they 
were granted freedom and were frequently offered the 
opportunity of saving their lives by recanting, and that 
they refused to do so. 

Under Francis I many believers were executed in 
France with unprecedented cruelty, and after him, under 
Francis II and Henry II, about fifty thousand Hugue- 
nots. During Bartholomew's night forty thousand, ac- 
cording to others seventy thousand, are said to have per- 
ished. In the Cevennes, Baville sent twelve thousand 
Protestants to be burned to death, to be stretched on the 
wheel, or to be hung, and many died in the galleys, and 
during the dragonnades. How many aged, children, 
women, and babes died, here and elsewhere, of privations, 
cold, hunger, during flight, in prison, and in consequence 
of abuses and tortures, no one knows. Similar condi- 
tions prevailed in England. After under Henry VIII, 
the number of Christians killed, according to the his- 
torian Fox's somewhat exaggerated statement, was as 
the sand of the sea, the pyres everywhere flamed anew 



THE BIBLB. 127 

under bloody Mary, his worthy daughter. In Ireland 
about twenty thousand to thirty thousand Protestants 
were killed during the "Irish carnage" in 1641. 

And how the Inquisition of the Middle Ages raged, 
during which several million heretics are said to have 
been burned or otherwise punished in the Netherlands, 
where, under Charles V, about fifty thousand people had 
been executed, and, after him, Philip II had to fear lest 
the country should be entirely depopulated ; how it raged 
in Spain, where Torquemada invented new, ingenious, 
and terrible ways of putting heretics to death, and boasted 
that he himself had burned alive more than eight thou- 
sand (imagine the sum total of tortures contained in this 
number ! ) ; how they butchered in Portugal, whence the 
Inquisition was introduced in East India, and raged 
against the so-called "Syrian" Church there! In Spain 
it lasted till Napoleon I, and in Goa till 1821. After the 
Waldenses had been persecuted for a hundred years, and 
after the terrible carnages of 1545 and 1655, fourteen 
thousand of them were imprisoned under Victor Amadeus 
II, Duke of Savoy, of whom five thousand lost their lives 
in a single year. During the years 1614-38 forty thou- 
sand Christians are said to have been killed in distant 
Japan. During the persecution of 1849 i^ Madagascar, 
eighteen hundred people were killed or severely punished 
in other ways on account of their Christian faith. In 
Spain, Matamoros and his companions, and in Tuscany 
the venerable Madiais, husband and wife, were sent to 
the galleys for life, as recently as fifty years ago, because 
they had read and distributed the Bible. And it is well 
known that even now Christians must die for the faith 
in Africa, China, Armenia, and other countries. 



128 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

Indeed, the Church of Christ has, down through the 
centuries, left behind a long trail of blood. For as winds 
drive a sailing vessel, so persecutions drive the Church 
toward its lofty goal, until in the last days of the Anti- 
christ there be added to the martyrs of the past "their 
fellow-servants and brethren, that should be killed as they 
were." (Rev. vi, ii.) 

That these things would come to pass, the Bible told 
beforehand. Here, too, we have a literal fulfillment of 
prophecy. "Ye shall be hated of all men for My name's 
sake. But there shall not an hair of your head perish. In 
your patience possess ye your souls." (Luke xxi, 17-19.) 
"Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall 
kill you. They shall lay their hands on you, and perse- 
cute you, delivering you up to the synagogues, and into 
prisons, being brought before kings and rulers, for My 
name's sake." "Ye shall be hated of all nations for My 
name's sake." "The time cometh, that whosoever killeth 
you will think that he doeth God service." (Matt, xxiv; 
Luke xxi; John xvi.) And thus it came to pass. Even 
the Apostle Paul in his day could write : "They were tor- 
tured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a 
better resurrection. Others had trial of cruel mockings 
and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprison- 
ment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were 
tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered 
about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, af- 
flicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy) ; 
they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens 
and caves of the earth." (Heb. xi, 35-38.) But in all 
this there was a promise given them: "Settle it there- 
fore in your hearts, not to meditate before what ye shall 



THB BIBLE. 129 

answer; for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which 
all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor re- 
sist." (Luke xxi, 14, 15.) "And when they bring you 
unto the synagogues and unto magistrates and powers, 
take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, 
or what ye shall say ; for the Holy Ghost shall teach you 
in the same hour what ye ought to say." (Luke xii, 11, 
12.) This also came to pass, literally, thousand-fold. 
Repeatedly the instructions given to "masters of heretics" 
are : "Do not enter into any discussion with heretics con- 
cerning the Bible; for they are so well versed in it, that 
you will not be able to stand against them. Contend 
solely on the ground of the Church authorities; on the 
whole, have done quickly with these stiffnecked people!" 
Over and over again we read in the acts of the martyrs : 
But when he meekly and joyfully gave answer concern- 
ing his faith, and from the Scriptures gave reason for 
the same, they interrupted him, raving, "Silence, heretic ! 
thou dog!" or, like Cardinal Borromeo to George of 
Ghese (1559), they cried angrily, "Fool, do you think 
you are wiser than all of us ?" And in the end their only 
argument was, "Burn him to death !" It was fear of this 
wisdom, which they could not resist, that, as mentioned 
above, tore out the tongues of these poor people, and even 
on the pyre silenced them with iron gags. And the 
prophecy of Christ, too, was often seen fulfilled: "The 
brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the 
father the child, and the children shall rise up against 
their parents, and cause them to be put to death." (Matt. 
X, 21.) 

But Christ had promised them also, "In the world ye 
shall have tribulation ; but be of good cheer, I have over- 
9 



I30 THE BIB LB THB WORD OP GOD. 

come the world." "Fear none of these things which thou 
shalt suffer. Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give 
thee a crown of life." And they were of good cheer, and 
remained so unto death. At all times their enemies had 
to wonder at the equanimity, the courage, the joy, yea, 
in many instances, the bliss, with which these martyrs of 
both sexes, young and old, among the high and the aris- 
tocratic, the rich and the educated, as well as among the 
poor and lowly, bore months of abuse, repeated torture, 
and the most cruel forms of death. "Victi sumns!" "We 
are conquered;" — a Roman proconsul exclaimed, when 
he saw how a young man suffered tortures and torments 
without groaning. "Victory! Victory and triumph!" B. 
Bartoccio in Rome (1569) cried from out the flames, and 
Antonius Oldevin in Cremona, "O sweet fire! O lovely 
flame!" "I know the Hueguenots," the sullen superin- 
tendent Baville said to a hangman ; "you will not be able, 
by any torture whatever, to extort from them a recanta- 
tion or a word of complaint." And the clergyman Brous- 
son, having been condemned by him, ascended the stairs 
leading to the scaffold, his face radiant with heavenly joy. 
But the hangman afterward confessed, "I have executed 
many persons, but have trembled at no other execution, 
as I trembled at Mr. Brousson's." "Be of good cheer, 
brethren, be of good cheer!" — these were the last words 
heard from the flames in which (1533) Martialis Alba 
and four friends were burned in Lyons, on the Place des 
Terreaux. 

Let us hear the unsuspected testimony of a Catholic 
of the time of the French Revolution, who otherwise 
bears these martyrs ill will : "Fires were kindled every- 
where. Even though the rigor of the law restrained the 



THB BIBLE. 131 

people in their duty, yet many were astonished at the per- 
sistent steadfastness of those who were led to the place 
of execution, and who lost their lives rather than their 
good courage. For when they perceived how plain women 
met torment, in order to witness for the faith; how on 
the way to death they sang psalms with a loud voice, and 
testified that Christ is their Redeemer; how virgins went 
forth to death more joyfully than to marriage; how men 
rejoiced when they saw the terrible preparations and in- 
struments for torture; how on the pyres, half burned 
and roasted, they looked down with unvanquished cour- 
age on the wounds they had received from red-hot tongs ; 
how, with joyful and holy countenance, they stood under 
the iron hooks of the hangmen, stood like rocks among 
the waves of the sea ; in a word, how they died smiling, — 
these sad and ever-renewed tragedies awakened some 
emotion, not only in the souls of the simple, but also in 
those of high rank. For the majority could not persuade 
themselves that these people were not on the side of right, 
since they clung so firmly to their convictions that they 
were willing to offer up their lives. Others were filled 
with pity and sadness at seeing them persecuted thus, 
and at beholding in public places the charred corpses 
swung aloft, fastened to hideous chains, as the sad re- 
mains of the execution; they could not restrain their 
tears, and their hearts wept together with their eyes." 
{Buck der Maertyrer, by Th. Fliedner, Vol. II, Part II, 

p. 139- ) 

All died courageously, even though not shouting joy- 
fully. Thus in his "History of Papacy," the Catholic 
Illeskas writes concerning a martyr who died in Valla- 
dolid, in 1559: "With incomparable intrepidity the bac- 



132 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

calaureus Herezuelo allowed himself to be burned alive. 
I stood so near to him that I could see him distinctly, and 
could observe his features. He could not speak, for he 
Avas gagged; but his entire behavior proved him to be a 
very daring and fearless man, who would rather be 
burned to death than subject himself to the faith of the 
Church. Although I observed him closely, I could not 
see the slightest trace of fear, nor a manifestation of pain. 
But his countenance showed a deep earnestness, the like 
of which I had never yet seen. It was something terrible 
to look at him." 

To be sure, the strength of these martyrs was not of 
themselves, but of God. Touchingly Huss complains 
that he fears the hatred of his enemies, and that the em- 
peror himself is not true to his word. Other martyrs 
wrestled with God, that through some gentler form of 
death He might save them from torture and the pyre ; and 
it is touching how pious and friendly Wishardt, seized 
by certain anticipation of a not distant martyr's death, 
gets up during the night, goes into his garden unnoticed, 
as he believed, and there prays with many tears, as once 
his Master had prayed, that this cup might pass away 
from him. But God strengthened these also, so that they 
could say, '*Not my will, but Thy will be done." Fer- 
vently they prayed to God that he might enable them, 
for His name's and His Word's sake, to leave and suffer 
all things, and He strengthened them. In many ways the 
history of the martyrs also teaches us to know the se- 
verity of God toward those who fell away. Many fell 
away, as Christ had prophesied: "Then shall many be 
offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate 
one another." (Matt, xxiv, lo.) Many of those who 



THB BIBLE. i33 

apostatized — as e. g., Archbishop Cranmer and Jerome 
of Prague — felt the word, "Whosoever shall be ashamed 
of Me and of My words, of him also shall the Son of 
man be ashamed" (Mark viii, 38), like a sword in their 
hearts; they recalled their recantation, and joyfully suf- 
fered death by burning. But terrible judgment was 
passed upon others — c. g., on the Italian Spiera, who had 
to confess, "Contrary to my clear conviction I have pub- 
licly denied the truth; there is no hope for me;" and who, 
after much anguish of soul, despairs and voluntarily 
starves to death. History also makes mention of the 
terrible end of many persecutors, which fate was often 
announced to them by the martyrs. God is not mocked. 

But the history of persecutions also shows that this 
God has power to protect His own, if He wills to do so. 
Of many a faithful witness he says to Satan, "That one 
I have delivered into your hands, but do not touch this 
one;" and, like Daniel in the den, the lions are not per- 
mitted to assail him. This divine protection is often 
manifested most clearly in the lives of great witnesses to 
the Gospel, who are most bitterly hated and pursued by 
the devil. Luther was banished from the empire, and 
any one was at liberty to kill him with impunity. How 
many enemies Avere thirsting for his blood; how gladly 
they would have burned him ! But no one was permitted 
even to smite him on the cheek, and although bitterly 
persecuted, he died quietly on his bed. Thus also Calvin, 
Farel, Knox. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous 
in our eyes. 

Thus, in the first place, the glory of the Bible is seen 
in its prophetic view, when it predicts that the followers 
of Christ will be hated, persecuted, and killed, and then 



134 THE BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

promises them superhuman wisdom; again, in the fulfill- 
ment of this promise in the lives of hundreds of thou- 
sands, the glory of the Bible is manifested as a power of 
God unto salvation to every one that believeth. Here our 
hands, as it were, can lay hold on the truth, that the love 
of Christ, the love of His own for Him, His love for 
them, and the powers of the world to come, which are 
granted them by Him, easily and smilingly have over- 
come the world and the devil. Compared with other 
books, too, the Bible is seen as something different and 
higher, in that it of itself, without the aid of earthly 
means, overcomes the world. The Roman emperors 
thought they must protect their gods with fire and sword. 
Take the sword, Mahomet commanded his disciples, and 
kill those who refuse to believe in me. But just as it 
pleases God to bring to naught the wisdom of the wise, 
so He sends His own into the hostile world defenseless, 
"as sheep in the midst of wolves." And yet they have 
conquered without battle and without resistance. By 
permitting themselves to be slaughtered like sheep, they 
became invincible. Indeed, at the sight of this we are 
seized with astonishment, as was John when, in the vis- 
ions of God, he beheld the woman drunken with the blood 
of the saints. Who ever heard of such- warfare? What 
kind of soldiers does God send against His enemies? 
Old men, weary with age; weak women and maidens; 
babes, tender youth; men ofttimes sick or weakened by 
privation and abuse, without power or station or reputa- 
tion, unknown, poor, isolated. What weapons does He 
give them against Caesars and their mailed legions; 
against the murderous wrath of wild and cruel heathen 
and their tyrants; against the power and hatred of all 



THB BIBLH, i35 

kingdoms of the earth? His Word; against fire and 
sword, only His Word. "How shall we fight?" they 
ask their Captain. Do not resist evil. Offer your hands 
for chains, your backs for the scourge, your members 
for torture. "But if, after such torture, our enemies at 
length determine to kill us, will You not then, our King 
and our God, cleave the heavens and come down, or at 
least send Your hosts of angels for our succor?" No; 
there shall be no voice nor answer nor sign from on high 
for your rescue; helpless, chained, gagged, flames will 
devour you, your enemies will laugh at your torment, 
your ashes will be committed to winds and waves. Go, 
then, and conquer the world. O foolishness of God, how 
great thou art ! 

Even this God suffers and is silent; suffers silently 
that His name is blasphemed, that His Word is hated, 
that His Church is oppressed. He is derided and scoffed 
at by the world, by His creatures ; the wicked triumph — 
and He endures it. JSFevertheless He is victorious daily, 
and quietly He brings about what pleases His counsel, 
until some day He will return in majesty with His own 
to take vengeance on His adversaries. Then they shall 
look on Him whom they pierced ; but also on them whom, 
for His Word's sake, they have killed. "Look at us 
closely," a martyr, dying with others, cried to his tor- 
mentors and the surrounding multitude, "in order that 
3'ou may recognize us in the day of judgment." 

What do those, who to-day call themselves Chris- 
tians, make of this powerful testimony of the martyrs? 
Instead of rejoicing in such glorious, hundred thousand 
fold witness for the Bible ; instead of giving God and His 
Word the glory; instead of exulting in true communion 



13^ THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

with the saints, and in the firm hope that some day we 
shall rise again with this innumerable host, and shall be- 
hold Him in whom they and we believed ; instead of tak- 
ing strength from this hope, in order that they for their 
part might be witnesses to the truth, — they allow them- 
selves to be shaken by every wind of doctrine; by every 
empty and shallow objection; by every criticism of faith, 
clothed in phrases that sound scientific; and they bow to 
every word of man. A sign of indigence, and a righteous 
judgment upon them. From those who will not confess 
Him God gradually takes away all light, and delivers 
them up to the spirits of falsehood who "are in the air." 
Woe unto us who have nothing but a smile left for the 
simple, imshakable Bible-faith of those martyrs and 
heroes of faith. 

But the Word of God and its effect may be likened 
unto the wind. Now it rages in the storm and the hurri- 
cane, and breaks to pieces the oaks of Bashan ; men arise 
who are baptized with the Spirit and with fire, and in 
battle cast down the spirits of darkness and the children 
of the devil; so it was in the apostolic Church, in the 
Reformation, in the missions among savage people. 
Now this wind rustles faintly in the high treetops, and 
seems to die out. But just as in the ocean not a single 
drop of water, and in the air not a single atom, is really 
at rest, so the wind and the Spirit blow over cradle and 
grave, and ever again over new cradles and new graves, 
and carry away our words and deeds, our laughing and 
our weeping, so that we may laugh and weep anew. And 
restlessly Spirit and Word are working at the soul, mold- 
ing and forming and fashioning its millions of cells and 
fibers, and shaping them, as a potter shapes the clay, by 



THE BIBLE. ^37 

means of a word at which it laughs, an idea that exalts 
it, a thought that comforts it, a remembrance that sad- 
dens it. What a wonderful thing this soul of man is in 
its weakness and in its great power ! 

What had these martyrs learned out of their Bible? 
Something very simple, and yet, as already stated, the 
very essence and content of all Christianity. They had 
learned to say yea to God and his entire Word; to say 
nay to the devil, his children, and his entire kingdom. 
With these two little words they were omnipotent. 
"Pray to the gods! Curse Christ!" the Roman powers 
cried to them. ^^NoT they said calmly, and died smil- 
ing ; and the entire Roman Empire, and later Papacy and 
Inquisition, with torture and fire, were not able to con- 
quer such a little soul, or to harm it in the least; nor 
would a thousand worlds full of wrath and hatred and 
hellish torments have been able to do it, — they could only 
rend its garment, the covering of clay ; but the soul itself 
soared up to God unharmed and joyful. 

Has the Bible this same power still? Is it not, ac- 
cording to the opinion of many, beginning to grow old? 
No; eternally the same is eternal youth, eternally effect- 
ive, it breaks hard hearts and heals wounded hearts; 
this Book, and those who believe it, conquered the Roman 
Empire by means of the Word ; brought about the Refor- 
mation in spite of the pope and emperor by means of the 
Word. And in the final conflict, which is preparing, they 
will conquer the world and Antichrist, and out of the 
conflict there will again go forth a great congregation of 
witnesses, clothed in white. Meanwhile the Bible is con- 
verting souls out of all languages and peoples and 
tongues, as it has ever done. And after conversion it 



13^ THB BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

falls from the eyes of man ''as it had been scales," and 
he is amazed to find that this Book, which he had thought 
to be merely a book of general religious content or edi- 
fication, deals particularly with him and his affairs; that 
it is a Word of God, addressed to him! Into my soul, 
too, which was waste and void, and in which darkness 
was upon the face of the deep, God one day thundered. 
Let there be light ! And there was light ; the waters were 
divided from the waters; the dry land appeared, plants 
grew, and finally there came forth in ovo man in the like- 
ness of God. Then I got me out of my country and from 
my kindred, and was a stranger; I went to Egypt and 
was compelled to burn brick; I went through the Red 
Sea ; I thirsted in the wilderness, and ate heavenly manna ; 
I was bitten by fiery serpents; I stood undone before 
lightning Sinai; I ascended Nebo, in order to behold 
from afar the promised land. Like Job, I wrestled with 
God ; with David I sighed and shouted ; with the preacher 
I said. All is vanity! With the prophets I rejoiced in a 
great future; and to me also, the prodigal son, who for 
a long time had herded swine, the word came, "Son, be 
of good cheer ; thy sins be forgiven thee !" 

The Bible still commands the highest respect of great 
and unbiased minds. Thus Goethe writes: "I consider 
all four Gospels to be thoroughly authentic; for there is 
active in them a grandeur that proceeded from the person 
of Christ, and that in kind is as divine as the divine has 
ever appeared on earth." "I am convinced that the Bible 
grows more beautiful, the more one understands it." 
And the seventy-two-year-old philosopher of reason, 
Kant, writes {Brief an den Abt Sieyes in Paris, 1796) : 
"The Bible is the Book, the contents of which itself tes- 



THE BIBLE. 139 

tifies to its divine origin. In the greatness of the plan 
of salvation and its execution, it discloses to us the great- 
ness of our guilt, and the depth of our fall. The Bible is 
my greatest treasure; without it I should be miserable." 
In a letter to Stilling he writes : "You do well in seek- 
ing your only comfort in the Gospel, for it is an inex- 
haustible fountain of all truths which, when reason has 
surveyed its entire domain, can be found nowhere else." 
(See Stilling's Leben.) Similar thoughts were expressed 
by Herder, Arndt, Napoleon I, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 
Franklin, Schiller, Gladstone^ Bismarck, and others. 
Such statements, to be sure, are never mentioned by the 
admirers of these men, such as the present disciples of 
Goethe and Kant ; they are not suited to their idea of en- 
lightenment, and can not well be harmonized with their 
assertion that the Bible is reverenced only by feeble- 
minded persons. 

But this Bible not only remains worthy of reverence, 
it is still a hammer, breaking human hearts that are as 
hard as rock; a two-edged sword that pierces even to 
the dividing asunder of the joints and marrow; a power 
of God that makes a new creature out of the sinner. 
Upon the urgent request of a friend, a splendor-loving 
lady in Geneva, Claudine Levet, once (1532) resolved 
to hear the hated heretic Froment. She put on amulets, 
rubbed virgin wax on her face, placed verbena leaves on 
her temples as a safeguard against the evil sorcerer, and 
sat immediately in front of the plain-looking preacher 
with an air of derision and contempt, crossing herself. 
But while he spoke, the expression of her face changed. 
When he closed, she asked, "How do you know that what 
you said is true?" "Here it is written." "Give me the 



I40 THE BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

book." Quietly she went home, ordered that no one 
should disturb her, and remained locked in her room fof 
three days. She came forth from there an altogether 
different person. She is lost to us, her aristocratic 
friends lamented; she no longer cares for festivities, 
beautiful garments, and pleasures, but continually wants 
to visit the poor and the sick, and read her Bible. A 
few years ago there was a prize-fighter in England, 
strong as a giant, a rough and dreaded man. A word 
from the Bible struck him like a thunderbolt. A short 
time after this he was met by a rival, who, having heard 
that he had joined the sullen saints, mockingly chal- 
lenged him to a fight, and struck him in the face so hard 
that the blood gushed. He wiped off the blood, and said 
calmly: "If I did not know the Bible, I would beat you 
to death. I forgive you, and will not fight with you." 
In a hospital in Vienna there lies a poor man in his prime, 
who formerly was very active, and traveled a great deal, 
but for years has been incurably paralyzed, so that he 
can move only his head and his hands, and often suffers 
intense pain. A cheerless and hopeless existence, you 
will probably think. No longer !' He now has his Bible, 
and writes, "Not only the days, but also the nights are 
too short to thank God with shouting and tears of joy 
for all He gives me in His Word." Only three instances 
out of hundreds of thousands. 

Thousands have mocked this divine Word; millions 
have despised it; but mockers and despisers have passed 
away and are forgotten; comparatively few know their 
names. Two hundred and thirty years ago, Voltaire 
said, "Fifty years hence the world will hear no more of 
this Book." How now ? Translated in hundreds of Ian- 



THB BIBLE. Hi 

guages, distributed in millions of copies, it is preached 
to all nations, as "a testimony against them." Of the 
Bible not a verse, not a line has passed away, nor will 
any pass away as long as the world stands. 



Whence has the Bible this marvelous might and 
power over hearts ? From the fact that it says the exact 
opposite of what all sacred books of all nations teach. It 
conquers man by telling him what he most dislikes to 
hear, what to him is a most unpleasant sound — a mark 
of the high origin both of man and of the Bible. The 
Bible is the only book (this the historian of religions. 
Professor Max Mueller, of Oxford also asserts) which 
declares that man can not be justified by his own deeds. 

That man strives after justification is one result of 
the fall, which fall is witnessed to by conscience. At all 
times all ancient religions, millions of Brahmins and 
fakirs, monks and nuns, and those of the laity, have 
sought justification in mortifying the body in abstinence, 
in acts of penance, and in self-imposed torments; others 
in pilgrimages or crusades, or in founding cloisters and 
churches, or in pious legacies. Why have men at all 
times obeyed priests, who often demanded great sacri- 
fices from them ? Because in the depths of his soul man, 
even unrighteous man, hungers and thirsts after right- 
eousness; a strong proof that he feels himself to be un- 
righteous. The scholar, too, and the statesman, the war- 
rior and the artist, we all, are endeavoring to be justified 
by works. Through our actions we all want to justify our- 
selves as great or highly gifted, as righteous or virtuous 
or pious, as energetic or prudent or practical men; in 



142 THE BIB LB THE WORD OF GOD, 

short, we want to show the world that we are right, and 
can do things right. We all make our justification — in 
our sight and the sight of others, not in the sight of God 
— the chief task of our life. Eifi gemachter Mann, un 
homme arrive, a self-made man; thus we move about in 
our righteousness. The poor are ashamed of their pov- 
erty, because it witnesses against them that they are not 
able to get along with life; that they are not able to gain 
a place in the sun; that they have no right to existence. 
Whether haughtily or good-naturedly, the rich, wherever 
they go and wherever they are, say with their entire bear- 
ing : "Look at us ! We are the people who have accom- 
plished what you all would like to accomplish and can 
not;" and the world looks upon them as justified, and 
tips its hat. What is the reason of a great part of philan- 
thropy ? The ease with which one in this line can justify 
himself in his own sight and the sight of others, and, 
many think, in the sight of God also. 

Concerning this conduct of man, the Bible passes 
annihilating judgment: "^ man is not justified by the 
works of the law.'' This Book says that you who are 
estranged from God, who place your ego upon the altar, 
sing sweet songs of praise to it, and love it with all your 
heart and all your mind, are nothing, an extinguished 
light, a fountain gone dry, salt that has lost its savor, a 
dry limb, just good enough for the fire. Princes and 
subjects, men of rank and vagrants, church-goers and 
blasphemers, ingenious minds and blockheads, potent and 
impotent, rich and poor, ladies of rank and honorable 
matrons, pure virgins and common wenches, artists and 
business men, pious and godless authors, priests and 
monks, — whatever your name, your bearing, your station. 



THE BIBLE. i43 

you are all worthless and damned. "The Lord looked 
down from heaven upon the children of men, . . . 
and there is none that doeth good, no, not one J' (Psa. 
xiv, 2, 3.) 

One must admit that this Biblical contempt of all 
that mankind does and has and is, is simply grand. Here 
there is at last something absolute, without ifs and buts, 
without circumlocutions and compromises, without ex- 
ceptions and clauses. And something in us answers, It 
is so. 

But to him who believes in the condemning law of a 
just God ; to him who, being undone, cries out, "Is there 
no hope for me? Wilt Thou, O Lord, show wrath eter- 
nally? Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!" — to him the 
Bible proclaims a second truth, also unheard of, taught 
by no other religion, found in no other book, never con- 
ceived of by the heart of man : "God so loved the world, 
that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever be- 
lieveth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting 
life." God Himself, in His Son, who says, "I and My 
Father are one," is made flesh and assumes our guilt: 
"God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself." 
The Master suffers for the servant. What a message! 
And, indeed, only God can take away the sin of a world ; 
Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Mahomet, and all other teach- 
ers of mankind, were not even able to ward off guilt, 
disease, and death from themselves. How then could 
such, or even a Jesus were he a mere man, be able to 
hear the groaning of the creation, and deliver plants and 
animals and the visible universe, even to the most distant 
fixed star, from the curse of vanity and of death? He 
who believes that Christ is God, and yet does not speak 



144 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

of Him as Redeemer, shows that he has not anticipated 
the greatness of the creative Logos, and therefore can 
not anticipate the greatness of the redeeming Logos. 
Here, too, unbehef distinguishes itself by its Hmited view 
of the cosmic world. 

Law and Gospel — this the Bible, and the Bible alone, 
proclaims; the inexorable justice and the incomprehensi- 
bly great love of the living God; that which crushes, 
destroys, and condemns, and that which comforts, raises 
up, and revives. And the second is never without the 
first. One may speak and teach ever so much about the 
Gospel, if he does not believe in the law of Jehovah, 
given from Sinai, his essence of Christianity, his Chris- 
tology, his ethics, yea, his entire religion, is an aircastle. 
The granite substructure is wanting. This is true of 
modern teachers. They deny the law, which damns. 
Then what need is there of redemption ? They teach that 
man of himself can attain to sonship, and can justify 
himself. Then why the incarnation of God? We do 
not want to trouble Him. But what they accomplish 
without Him, is not something divine; it is something 
quite human — a little moral doctrine mixed with bel- 
esprit religion for the parlor-table of self-sufficient Philis- 
tines of the spirit. 

Because God is our Creator; because we are fallen, 
and unable to pay our debt, and he has done it for us, 
therefore the Bible, in the third place, makes the unheard- 
of, blissful and dreadful demand, "Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength" — a 
demand, invented by no other religion, proclaimed by no 
other sacred book, and never having entered into the heart 



THB BIBLE. H5 

of man. And it is a bitter word for man. "I," and 
again "I," and a third time "I !" then nothing for a long 
time; then finally some one else or something else, — 
this, consciously or tmconsciously, is the motto of the 
man of this world. To love one's self a great deal, and 
to love God a little besides, — this, in practice, even some 
pious people consider the normal relation of things. De- 
liberately, and with the aid of my reason and the advice of 
prudent, practical men, to choose my way, and then to 
pray God that He might accompany me on this way; to 
be wrapped up in business affairs all day long, and in 
the evening to pray that God might bless my labors, in 
order that I might have my daily bread, and be able to 
lay by something for the future and for my children ; to 
be spent in my vocation, in order that I may prove my- 
self a worthy man, filling my place for the welfare of 
mankind and being an honor to myself and to my God, — 
is not all this proper? God certainly can not demand 
more of me. Yes, He demands incomparably, unreason- 
ably more! You and I shall love Him with all our 
thoughts. And conscience tells us that He has a right to 
demand this. What shall I do? God commands, and I 
am not able. Here, too, man is helpless. Here, too, God 
Himself steps in, and says : I will do it. Christ, the in- 
carnate God, thus loved the Father. Here, too, he ful- 
filled the law that He had given. Apart from Him, man 
can do nothing. 

And since love alone is truly fruitful, this love for 
the highest and best produces good works in those *'in 
whose hearts it is shed abroad through the Holy Ghost," 
and does this as naturally as man breathes ; and as little 
as a man boasts of breathing, so little the Christian boasts 

10 



146 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

of his works. He shall do good deeds every day, and 
every evening he shall pray, "Lord, be merciful to me, a 
sinner, and forgive me even my good works !" If Luther, 
at the end of his life, confessed that his most severe strug- 
gle had been against the thought that he had at any time 
done some good deed, what reason could we poor little 
Christians have to boast of our good works? 



If, as we have seen, the revelation of Jehovah, God, 
is the radiant central point of the Old Testament, the 
New Testament is the good message that this God came 
into the flesh and became man, in order to take away the 
sin of the world. This Jehovah is the Messiah that was 
promised long ago; He bruised the serpent's head; in 
Him all the nations of the earth are blessed ; and if a cer- 
tain man dared to proclaim to the Christians of German 
tongue. The Son does not belong in the Gospel, we say, 
The Gospel is the Son, and the Son only. Here there is 
light ; and in this light, which illuminates the Old Testa- 
ment also, we recognize with glad astonishment in the 
entire Bible the revelation of Christ, as the Alpha and 
Omega, as the beginning, the middle, and the end of 
creation ; yea, as the only revelation of the unfathomable 
Godhead given to creatures. "No man knoweth the 
Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will 
reveal him." 

The Bible reveals Christ, in the first place, as the 
Word of God, which created the universe. "And God 
said." We have said : God, as He who He was and has 
been from all eternity, "dwelleth in the light which no 
man can approach unto." "No man hath seen God at 



THE BIBLE. 147 

any time." He is true being, the source of all forces and 
development. He, the Endless, the Infinite, would eter- 
nally be incomprehensible to His creatures; for in Him 
there is nothing finite or created. The creature must be 
finite ; this is implied in the Word itself. Even our eter- 
nal life is not infinite: in the first place, because it has 
had a beginning; in the second place, because, in connec- 
tion therewith and in consequence thereof, it does not 
include the life of all other beings, even of God Himself ; 
but it is endless, because it eternally flows into us from 
God, the source of all life. But God eternally and con- 
tinually begets the Son, who says of Himself, "I and My 
Father are one." "He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
Father," but who, as regards creation, is also "the begin- 
ning of the creation of God." He, the eternal Son, Christ, 
is the revelation, the visibility, "the image of the invisible 
God, the firstborn of every creature : for by Him were all 
things created that are in heaven and that are in the earth, 
visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or domin- 
ions, or principalities, or powers: all things are created 
by Him, and for Him. And He is before all things, and 
by Him all things consist f (Col. i, 15-18.) He, the 
Word, expresses in finite, creative form, what from eter- 
nity he beheld in the Father. "In the beginning was the 
Word, and the Word was God." Creation is a gift of the 
Father to the Son; according to the Father's eternal 
thought it is created by the Son to the honor of the 
Father. This creation, effected through the Word, also 
contains the Word of God, as law. For every divine 
thought is absolute and eternal law. In Eden, Adam was 
in need of no other law than that expressed in divine na- 
ture surrounding him. As long as he remained sinless, 



148 THE BIB LB THE WORD OE GOD. 

the words of creation were lively and intelligible for him. 
In the material light, not that of the earth, but that of 
the garden that God had planted, he would have seen the 
law of eternal light and of knowledge; in the plant he 
would have seen the law of spiritual growth and fruitful- 
ness, etc. The tilling of the garden that God had planted 
would have fully sufficed, without the law from Sinai to 
bring him in ever closer and loftier communion with God. 
Thus he would also have had part in the tree of life. But 
when he fell, creation came to be for him, as it still is, 
an external, lifeless, material phenomenon. The quick 
words of God have come to be mere dumb things for us, 
and tell us nothing. We do indeed behold the tree and 
the animal, the sea and the mountain and the cloud with 
a certain childish interest; but we do not understand 
these divine hieroglyphics, these letters of Jehovah's 
name ; do not understand what they are in themselves, and 
what they are for us; and many have looked upon the 
lilies of the field and the birds of the air all their lives, 
without learning even the first beginnings from them, 
namely, that the God who nourishes them, and clothes 
the grass thus, can also provide for and clothe us with- 
out our assistance and our care; or he daily beholds the 
tree, which has grown from a tiny seed, and which an- 
nually bears many hundredweight of fruit, but does not 
recognize in it a multiplying of nourishing matter, equally 
as wonderful as the feeding of the five thousand with 
five loaves and two fishes. 

In the second place, the Bible reveals Christ as the 
Jehovah of Sinai. That He is the Jehovah of Sinai is 
clearly contained in John i, 3, 14. And he adds, "No 
man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, 



THE BIBLE. i49 

He hath declared Him." (Ver. i8.) Therefore even Moses 
on Sinai did not see the Godhead, but the Son, "the image 
of the invisible God." Through John, the Holy Ghost 
plainly says of Isaiah, ''These things said Esaias, when 
he saw His glory, and spake of Him." (John xii, 41 ; of. 
Isa. vi.) If possible, Paul speaks still more clearly, re- 
ferring to the children of Israel in the wilderness, "They 
drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them; and 
that Rock was Christ;" and "neither let us tempt Christ, 
as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of ser- 
pents." (i Cor. X, 4, 9.) Of Himself this Jehovah Christ 
prophesies; "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that 
I will raise to David a righteous branch; . . . and 
this is His name whereby He shall be called, THE LORD 
OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS." (Jer. xxiii, 5, 6.) And 
again: "Thus saith Jehovah, which stretcheth forth the 
heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and 
formeth the spirit of man within him : I will pour upon 
the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusa- 
lem, the spirit of grace and of supplications; and they 
shall look upon Me whom they have pierced^ and they 
shall mourn for Him, as one mourneth for his only son." 
(Zecli. xii, 10.) If the Logos is He who creates, and 
every creative word is a law, then it is just and natural 
that He reveals the spiritual law also, legible for sinless 
Adam, but for fallen man hidden in the material laws of 
creation. Upon the granite summit of Sinai Christ de- 
scended in fire and thunder, the dreadful, just, holy, 
jealous God, before whose countenance sinners perish; 
and the merciful God, who visits the iniquity of the 
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth gen- 
eration of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto 



I50 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

thousands of them that love Him. Now this Jehovah, as 
the image of the invisible God, clothes Himself in His 
terrible majesty, and declares to Moses, who would be- 
hold the Father in Him, "Thou canst not see My face; 
for there shall no man see Me and live." Now He clothes 
Himself in loveliness, and the seventy elders are per- 
mitted to see the God of Israel, above whom the vaulted 
heavens are like unto sapphire. Now He lays aside, as 
it were, the insignia of His majesty and power, converses 
face to face with Moses, like a man with his friend, and 
says with touching familiarity, ''Speak no more unto Me 
of this matter." (Deut. iii, 26.) But here He is ever 
the law, and in the conscience of every man expresses 
clearly and definitely the categorical imperative that lies 
dormant in Him. 

Then the Bible shows us Christ as the great divinely 
commissioned Messiah^ the fidilller of the law, and the 
Redeemer from all sorrow; of whom Moses, David, and 
"all the prophets" (Acts x, 43) spake. In opposition to 
those, who in our day combat the prophecy of Christ in 
the Old Testament, Christ and the Scriptures declare 
that the ancient men of God had a clearer prescience of 
Christ and His sacrificial death than their mere biography 
and their works lead us to anticipate. Thus Christ says 
of Abraham, "Abraham saw My day, and was glad;" 
and, as said above, Isaiah saw His glory, and spoke of 
Him. 

From Moses and all the prophets, Christ explains 
minutely to the disciples of Emmaus the prophecy of His 
suffering and His glory ; for "to Him give all the prophets 
witness, that through His name whosoever believeth in 
Him shall receive remission of sins." (Acts x, 43.) But 



THB BIBLE. 151 

in order to see this, it is necessary, of course, that Christ 
open our understanding, as He opened that of the disci- 
ples of Emmaus, that we may understand the Scriptures. 

Then the New Testament relates how the long-prom- 
ised sun rose, which, like a morning star, had shone ahead 
in prophecy. ''The people, that walked in darkness, have 
seen a great light." And with Simeon and the prophets 
the spirits of the perfected saints shouted, *'For unto us 
a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the govern- 
ment shall be upon His shoulder : and His name shall be 
called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The 
Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." (Isa. ix, 6.) 

It is overwhelmingly beautiful, how in this Biblical 
theosophy of one cast the Son of God, who, as the creative 
Logos, is the mouth of the Eternal, and who afterwards 
was the proclaimer of the law contained in creation, now 
that man feels his inability to fulfill the law, says : Now 
I, who am Myself the law, will fulfill this law instead of, 
and in the name of^ rnan. On this account fallen man 
will hate Me and kill Me, and will thereby, without hav- 
ing willed it, fulfill the eternal decree of redemption. 
"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and 
we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of 
the Father, full of grace and truth." This is the bright 
sun that sheds its light back over the entire Old Testa- 
ment, and ahead over the New Testament, till to the last 
verse of Revelation. 

Finally, the Bible shows Christ as the judge of the 
world. At the close of the world's history, God, the 
Father, ^'commits all judgment unto the Son; for the 
Father judgeth no man." (John v, 22.) He, the Word 
of God, who created the world, who gave the law unto 



152 THB BIBLE THB WORD OP GOD, 

men, who in their stead fulfilled this law, and now de- 
mands of them only that they believe this fulfillment, — 
He will judge this human race, which proudly and self- 
righteously says : I do not believe the message, and am 
not in need of a Redeemer; I am able to help myself. 
This close will be great, blessed, and destructive beyond 
measure, unspeakably satisfying and fulfilling all de- 
mands and longings, when the Creator and Redeemer 
shall descend upon the clouds in all His unveiled majesty, 
to the unspeakable comfort of His own, to the most awful 
consternation of His enemies, who have corrupted the 
earth. "Surely I come quickly." 

These are indeed great secrets, sublime and dread- 
ful mysteries. Here below we shall never be able to com- 
prehend the incarnation of a God, — whether in heaven? 
But : Thus it is written. And him who says he can not 
believe it, because he can not grasp it, we answer aston- 
ished : My brother, what are you and I able to grasp ? 
Are we not walking among mysteries and over abysses? 
Do not things that we can not grasp, can not fathom, 
stare us in the face at every step? Where were you, 
where was I fifty or a hundred years ago? Did at that 
time any creature in all the universe have any knowledge, 
any anticipation, that we should arise? Then a soul fell 
upon the earth. Why? for what purpose? What is a 
soul? This soul clothed itself in matter, and became 
visible, a grain of sand in this earth, which to it is en- 
tirely new. Now, by means of a few pounds of thought- 
substance and brain-substance and mysterious senses, it 
grasps the world and God, and applies its criterion to 
both. A few moments more, and, perhaps suddenly, the 
body of clay crumbles to dust, and this soul slips away 



THE BIBLE. 153 

unseen, — a spirit that had appeared, and had for a few 
seconds moved a bit of matter. Where is it? Where 
shall we be a hundred, a thousand years hence? What 
world shall we then perceive, and with what kind of 
senses? In what kind of words shall we then speak? In 
what manner of visibility shall we appear ? By means of 
what heavenly or hellish substance shall we think and 
act, and what will be the content of our thought and 
action ? 

How, then, can we coolly say of the deeds and the 
nature of God, It can not be, for I can not comprehend it ? 

What is the position of present Christianity in the 
face of this clear and grand message of the divine Word ? 
Millions in this country, who nominally belong to the 
Church of Christ, no longer know anything of this mes- 
sage, have forgotten it; and many who know of it, do 
not want to know anything of it. Life is short, they cry ; 
w^e must hasten to gain money and possessions, glory 
and honor, power and knowledge, before we pass away ; 
what follows after, no one knows. Others accept of the 
Gospel what suits them, calmly ignoring the terrible 
threats of Christ against His enemies, and His words of 
the judgment and eternal fire, and lying to themselves 
and others, that Christ had proclaimed a mild religion 
of love (by which they mean tender-heartedness and sen- 
timentality) and of freedom; that it is true Christianity 
to get away from rigid Church dogma, and to lead a spir- 
itually free and aesthetic life, with religiousness, virtue, 
and charity. Such doctrine is pleasing to a generation 
whose inmost soul is opposed to all law and all authority. 
Banish even from the schools, they cry, these childish 



154 THB BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

legends of a creative Word of God ; this Mosaic law, com- 
piled by sly priests; these pretended prophecies of illit- 
erate and superstitious ''prophets," — away with all tra- 
ditions! We want to be free in religion and science, in 
art and literature, in State and family; fettered by no 
prejudices and presuppositions; believing in our own 
reason, and in nothing else. What the result is, we see 
daily. 

They all do not know the Christ of the Scriptures. 

This is true of those who, in our day, believe in the 
historic Christ rather than in the Christ of the Church. 
Have we any other historic sources concerning Him than, 
according to God's counsel, solely the four Gospels ? But 
that does not matter to them. In the first place, all that 
is miraculous in Him is deducted as unhistoric; then the 
fourth Gospel, which reveals His glory more than any 
other, is declared unauthentic; finally, whatever of His 
words and deeds is not in harmony with preconceived 
opinions is designated as unreliable report, and various 
things in keeping w^th His age and its views, and of 
which the Bible knows nothing, are falsely attributed to 
Him. Out of what remains after such procedure, they 
form a small figure, and offer their fabrication as the 
"historic Christ." 

Of the Jesus of others it may be said, "The chief 
priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and 
the whole council, and bound Jesus, and carried Him 
away, and delivered Him to Pilate." Even in our day 
high servants of the Church, elders, held in the ban of 
human traditions a century old, and such as consider 
themselves well versed in the Scriptures, bind Jesus — not 
Christ ; for Him they do not know, and He will not per- 



THE BIBLE. 155 

mit Himself to be bound by men. They bind Him and 
say : Now He can perform no miracles, can cast out no 
devils, can not forgive sins, can not rise on the third day, 
can not sit down at the right hand of God, and can not 
return in the clouds for judgment. Having thus bound 
Him, they deliver Him up to the world, which no longer 
has reason to fear Him. But we refuse to accept a Jesus 
bound thus. How can He, being bound, give us liberty ? 
If He is not risen, we are yet dead in our sins, and are 
lost. Then we agree with modern scribes: "This Jew- 
ish rabbi has no answer to the problems that now move 
Christianity; He belongs to His age, and not to ours." 
Then this man, who parades false miracles, who presump- 
tuously considers himself to be the Son of God, even God 
Himself, who so misjudges men and conditions, that He 
brings ruin upon Himself, is a repulsive personality. 
Either the Son of God, or one Himself deceived, and de- 
ceiving others ! How long halt ye between two opinions, 
ye modern Christians ? 

Others, of emotional nature, believe in a romantic 
Christ, a la Renan, a pale young enthusiast with wonder- 
fully deep eyes, surrounded by penitent Magdalenes, in- 
wardly lamenting the affliction of His people, dreaming of 
its future glory and of its re-establishment as a kingdom 
of God on earth. But the idealist is lacking in energy; 
He flees to the desert when He hears that the multitude de- 
sires to make Him king ; when He hears that Herod has 
killed His friend John, disheartened by the hatred of the 
priests and the indifference of the multitude. He despairs 
of His mission and resolves to die as martyr, at least, in 
order that after His death He might still seem great to 
His fanatic followers. And in their ecstasy these emo- 



156 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

tionalists imagine that they see Him enter among them, 
that they hear His dear voice, and beheve that, through 
their tears, they see Him ascending to heaven, — a picture, 
every feature of which is as untrue, as those which the 
modern art of Max Khnger, Uhde, and v. Gebhardt pres- 
sent to us. 

Others compare Christ with Buddha, find a striking 
similarity between the two, and even consider Buddha 
to be the more original and the higher of the two, and 
Christ to be his disciple. Such views can, of course, be 
entertained only by those in whose heads are the begin- 
rjings of Nirvana, and who in this mental twilight are no 
longer able to distinguish black from white. In answer 
it may suffice to quote the very pertinent words of A. W. 
Hunzinger {Alter Glaube, 1902) : "Was Christ a pessi- 
mist, an atheist, a nihilist, like Gautama Buddha ? Is the 
eternal life of the Gospel the empty Nirvana of the 
Buddhistic despiser of the world? Is the new birth of 
water and spirit, without which no man can see the king- 
dom of God, the same as the endless transmigration of 
souls, taught by the visionaries of India? And is the 
impersonal, unrelenting natural law of cause and effect, 
which makes all things revolve and suffer incessantly, at 
all similar to an omnipotent and merciful God's govern- 
ment of the world, who numbers the hairs of our head, 
and without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground? 
Has the eternal redemption which the Son of God pur- 
chased on Calvary anything at all in common with the 
self-annihilation by means of which the Buddhist, weary 
of this world, destroys the delusion of his existence?" 
The dying words of Gautama Buddha were, "All is van- 
ity !" The dying words of Christ were, "It is finished !" 



THE BIBLE, 157 

Many preach the social Christ. This, too, is a modern 
widespread error. Let us consider it more minutely. 

Jesus was not a social reformer, and did not pretend 
to be one ; and to brand Him such, is to ignore completely 
facts reported concerning Him. This Dr. Sheldon does 
in his book, ''In His, Steps," which is characteristic of 
this tendency. Are we not to walk in Christ's steps? 
Certainly! That the Christian should follow Christ is 
nothing new. Christ Himself commanded it; and for 
nineteen hundred years several millions of Christians 
have done so, even though in weakness, and thousands 
of martyrs have borne their cross after Him. Should we 
not, every one of us, have the mind which was also in 
Christ ? Certainly ! But this mind does not make a Jesus 
out of us. Let a soldier be ever so faithful in executing 
the commands and plans of his captain, even endanger- 
ing his own life, yet he is not the captain. Let a man be 
ever so faithful and loyal to his king; let him be a thor- 
ough-going, monarchically-minded royalist, yet he has 
not the power of the king. Every apprentice, pupil, dis- 
ciple, walks, and should walk, in his master's steps; but 
that does not make him master. Between Christ and man 
there is an infinitely greater difference. These two na- 
tures are incomparable. Christ's actions, even though he 
walked on earth as a man, were thoroughly divine, sin- 
less, and holy. Your actions and mine remain human, 
stained with sin and unclean, and can never be accepted 
of God as good. But does not Paul say: "I can do all 
things through Christ?" Yes, he can do all things, as 
long as Christ works in him; but this strength is not of 
himself, and is not at his disposal. "It is God which 
worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure." 



158 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

Here, too, I am to take no thought for the morrow, and 
am not to resolve, or even vow, that henceforth I will 
do what Jesus did. When the Christian resolves to do 
good, and says, "I will," God shatters his resolution, and 
shows him his impotence; for God is not in need of our 
action ; but He would make us sinners truly, in order that 
He may be able by grace to save us. All good that man 
may do, is God's free gift to him. 

What did Jesus do for the distressed who came unto 
Him ? In the first place, He forgave them their sins, if 
they desired forgiveness. (Matt, ix, 2, et al.) Can you 
do that ? In the second place. He healed them, suddenly 
and completely: "Take up thy bed and walk!" "Be 
clean!" Can you do that? In the third place, with a 
look that pierced their inmost heart ("for He knew what 
was in man"). He spoke words to those who approached 
Him with questions, words ofttimes unexpected, which, as 
in the case of the rich young man, of Nicodemus, and 
others, like lightning, illumined their entire past life and 
the depths of their soul, but also pointed out to them the 
steep, narrow, heavenward way. Can you do that ? No ! 
For what purpose did Jesus come into the world at all? 
In order to redeem the world by His word and His death, 
and "to give His life a ransom for many." Can you do 
that? No. You are not Jesus, and you will never be 
Jesus. You can not take away the sin of the world. You 
can not forgive sins. You can not give away heaven. 

Somewhat easier is the answer to the question, Wliat 
would Jesus not do? — not do to-day, not do if He were in 
my place. For He is "the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever." The answer is crushing for social reformers 
like Sheldon, for the Elsmereites, for Tolstoi, and for 



THE BIBLE. 159 

many Christian socialists in Germany. They preach : 
Above all things, the Christian must take part in social 
conditions, must secure for the poor, the disinherited, the 
proletarians, an existence worthy of man; then, and not 
till then, will they believe in our Christianity ; their bodies 
must be helped before the message of salvation can appeal 
to their souls. Did Jesus do that? No! Did He give 
any poor man money, or help him get clothes or a 
better home, or procure work for any man out of employ- 
ment (and there were such in His day also) ? (The five 
thousand and the four thousand, whom He fed, were 
people who had hastily gathered about Him, not starving 
proletarians.) Or did He ever, even in a single word, 
touch upon the slavery question, which for the entire 
Roman Empire was a burning question at that time, 
more so than the labor question in our day? or did He 
organize societies for the abolition of this scandalous in- 
justice? Did He assist the suppressed in securing their 
rights, even where, byj^irtue of the influence of His word, 
it would have been an easy matter for Him to do so ? No ! 
"Man," He says, "who made Me a judge or a divider 
over you ?" In the Sermon on the Mount He establishes 
a law that is binding for the individual Christian, but 
useless for a Christian socialistic State. Or is the steal- 
ing of a coat to be rewarded by the gift of a cloak in this 
Christian socialistic State? Did He inflame the failing 
courage or the dying patriotism of the people of God? 
Did He, with flaming words, enkindle love of country and 
of freedom ? or did He appoint the ministers of His Word 
to worldly office, in order to secure for them a whole- 
some influence on the people, and to give this influence 
more power? No! "I send you forth as sheep in the 



i6o THH BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

midst of wolves." ''My kingdom is not of this world." 
Did Jesus impress upon His listeners the benefits of civil- 
ization and money, or the cultivation of Christian art, 
and their employment in the conversion of the world? 
No, He says, "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain 
the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Did He advo- 
cate or agitate better legislation on the observance of 
Sunday or of the Sabbath, or the improvement of the con- 
dition of the laborer ? Or did this Jesus promise his "lit- 
tle children," of whom it is written, "Having loved His 
own which were in the world. He loved them unto the 
end," as much as "an existence worthy of man," with 
indemnity in case of death, disease, old age, and invalid- 
ity? Did he bequeath to them — it would have been an 
easy matter for Him — many millions for benevolent and 
missionary causes? (How much good they could have 
done with it, according to present-day notions!) No; 
He promises them hunger, need, imprisonment, persecu- 
tion, martyrdom. "I will show him how great things he 
must suffer for My name's sake." (Acts ix, i6.) Did 
Jesus have no heart in His bosom for His fellow-men? 
Certainly. But because His love is infinitely more ardent 
that our love; because heaven is infinitely more than the 
earth; because eternity is infinitely more than time; be- 
cause the soul is infinitely more than the body, — there- 
fore he looked to the infinitely more important, and looked 
away from the unimportant. "The dead" — the intel- 
lectually dead also — "are raised up," He reports to John, 
"and the poor have" — not their poverty banished, but — 
"the gospel preached to them." 

Neither did Jesus do in particular what the social 
reformers of our day demand. He was no abstainer, 



THE BIBLB, i6i 

founded no abstinence societies, and would not do so to- 
day. In Cana He changed water to wine, and not wine 
to water, as many abstainers would have done; this, too, 
was a symbolical deed. He ate and drank what was 
placed before him, and repeatedly instructed His disci- 
ples to do so (Luke x, 7) ; and they said "Behold a glut- 
tonous man and a winebibber !" Would to God that noble 
endeavors would succeed in reducing the number of sa- 
loons quite materially, and to check the vice of drunken- 
ness, which is spread by them! But abstinence must 
never be made a religious question and the criterion and 
characteristic of Christianity, or be lauded as "a saving 
of souls from death;" this is not according to the Bible. 
Drunkenness, like all vice, is a fruit of sin, not its root. 
The drunkard is not a sinner because he drinks ; he drinks 
because he is a sinner. His estrangement from God be- 
gets thirst for the stupefying and forgetting of his guilt 
and misery. Nor was Jesus an apostle of peace ; He did 
not found peace commissions, and wotild not do so to- 
day. "I came not to send peace, but a sword." True, he 
left His peace with His own; but to the world He an- 
nounced terrible wars, a rising of nation against nation, 
as the final chapter of its history. Jesus did not found 
savings banks, widows' funds, loan and life insurance as- 
sociations. He said, "Take no thought for the morrow ; 
after these things do the Gentiles seek." Jesus did not 
gather people unto Himself by singing and shouting, as 
the Salvation Army does. Of Him the prophet said, "He 
shall not cause His voice to be heard in the street." And 
He reprimanded the Pharisees severely for praying on 
the street corners. Jesus did not recommend His cross, 
the sign of the Son of man, the lofty symbol of His 



1 62 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

dreadful suffering, as the colored sign to the world of 
some virtue. The Christian knows only the black cross, 
invisible to the world, which he daily bears after his 
Savior. "The kingdom of God cometh not with ob- 
servation." 

These are a few of the things that Jesus did not do, 
and that He would not do to-day; for He is not a reed 
shaken with every wind of the spirit of the age. 

Philanthropy is not Christianity any more than are 
abstinence, temperance, diligence, order, frugality. Even 
heathen have possessed these virtues in a high degree. 
Rich Hindoos have ever made grand donations for philan- 
thropic purposes. Mohammedans and the otherwise cruel 
Tartars distinguish themselves by bountiful almsgiving, 
and by hospitality, even toward the poor. In all Italy 
Emperor Trajan had thousands of orphans educated and 
cared for, and in modern times a Girard spent millions 
for the poor and for schools, with the stipulation that no 
clergyman of any denomination should be permitted to 
enter the institution founded by him in Philadelphia. 
And to-day atheists, haters of Christianity (like Zola), 
hardened misers, and miserable usurers still practice ab- 
stinence and frugality, proof sufficient that these virtues 
are not in themselves Christian. 

And it is equally erroneous to make poverty and need 
synonymous with moral depravity and godlessness. That 
is calumniating the poor. Whoever has learned to know 
shepherds, fishermen, and seamen, or the poor peasants 
of Italy, Switzerland, Tyrol, Scotland, and Germany, 
has found them, for the greater part, sounder, more God- 
fearing, more content, and happier, than the rich, the 
educated, those engaged in industries, the cultured, and 



THB BIB LB. 163 

the so-called better society, where so many thousands of 
respectable people, and slaves to every bodily and intel- 
lectual fashion eke out a miserable existence, filling their 
homes with all kinds of unnecessaries, and their imper- 
ishable souls with love for money, honor, and self, with 
worthless gossip, with all forms of conventionality, super- 
ficiality, corruptibility, and vanity. The drunkenness of 
the poor is also exaggerated. I have lived among labor- 
ers for months, and do not remember having seen a sin- 
gle drunken man among them. I have know^n poor farm- 
ers, beggars, peddlers, crippled and blind persons, invalids 
paralyzed for fifteen years, washerwomen, and day la- 
borers, who were incomparably happier and nearer to 
divine truth than rich and aristocratic persons; for pov- 
erty and hard work are excellent means of education in 
the hand of the great heavenly Pedagogue. Even if 
social reformers should succeed in banishing all need and 
poverty, and should make it possible for the family of 
every abstinent poor man and laborer to live free from 
care and be content in a neat little house with 
electric lighting, bathroom, and yard, it would still 
be quite questionable whether the kingdom of God would 
thereby have been brought any nearer. Great are the 
blessings of poverty, whereby we do not mean social mis- 
ery, this result, fruit, and penalty of our much lauded in- 
dustry, but the neediness, the small possessions that God 
grants the millions. (It would be a small matter for God 
to flood them and the earth with blessings, so that they 
all would have a superabundance, as he will some day do 
in the millennium, — see the prophets.) Poverty makes 
poor in spirit, simple, modest, contented, courageous, 
grateful, liberal; it turns the soul away from the many 



I 



164 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

and manifold things that hold the rich man captive, di- 
rects upward, teaches to pray, and makes dying easier. 
Jesus says poverty is an aid, riches are a hindrance, to 
salvation. Were Homer and Socrates, Mahomet and 
Buddha, rich? What have the Croesuses and the Lucul- 
luses accomplished? What do they accomplish to-day? 
What did Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, the greatest 
among them that are born of women, the apostles, and 
Christ Himself, possess? History shows that the poor 
nations have ever conquered the world, and when they be- 
came rich, they were ruined by their wealth. 

That our understanding of, and our open vision for, 
the blessings of poverty and the curses of wealth is ever 
decreasing, is a result of our present-day admiration of 
matter in art, business, industry, commerce; a result of 
the cult of possessions, of convenience, and of enjoyment. 
Our increasing reverence for wealth, our dread of pov- 
erty as the greatest evil, our exaggerated commiseration 
of the poor — I do not say of the wretched — as if many a 
millionaire did not deserve far more pity than the day 
laborer or farmer, who is satisfied with his lot, — all this 
proves that we are not living in the light of eternity, 
since in this light the unequal division of this world's 
goods, and the evils resulting therefrom, would seem to 
us a secondary and transitory matter. 

When once this brief earthly existence shall have 
passed away, with its glory and its need, its money and 
its misery, its knowledge and its ability, there will no 
longer be any labor problem, social problem, or problem 
concerning the poor. Whether we have been rich or 
poor, whether we have traveled through life first class 
or fourth class, will then be of no importance whatever; 



THE BIBLE. i^S 

for one can die peacefully and happily in the poorhouscj 
in the hospital, or, like poor Lazarus, in the street; and 
one can die despairing in torments of body and soul in a 
palace and on a magnificent bed. If a man is converted, 
he always has an ^'existence worthy of man," whether he 
live in a garret or in a palace; if he is not converted, he 
has an "existence unworthy of man," whether he live in 
the most beautiful villa, in the office of a bank, or in a 
clubhouse, in a poorhouse, or in the gutter of the high- 
way. This life, with all its questions and interests, is 
unimportant, life eternal is infinitely important; and 
therefore Jesus did not consider it worth the while and 
the trouble even to discuss the many social reforms that 
present-day Christian social reformers push to the front. 
The fundamental error is not that the world, or so- 
called Christendom, does too little for those temporally 
poor and wretched; but that, blinded by sin, it believes 
that it is something, that it has something, that it is able 
to do something, that Jt knows something. In order to 
take away this harmful delusion Jesus came, and says: 
"Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and 
have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art 
wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. 
. . . Be zealous therefore, and repent." (Rev. iii, 
17, 19.) Humanity, like the prodigal son, has left its 
home and its Father, and is trying to feed on the husks 
of modern science, modern theology, modern philan- 
thropy ; but the soul is not satisfied with these. There is 
no help for the soul, except it come to itself, arise, come 
to the Father and say, "Father, I have sinned against 
heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be 
called Thy son." 



1 66 THE BIB LB THE WORD OP GOD, 

The true imitation of Christ consists, in the first 
place, in the knowledge that without Him we are lost and 
condemned sinners, and in laying hold by faith upon His 
merits and His propitiatory death, whereby we are justi- 
fied in the sight of God. ''Except a corn of wheat fall 
into the ground and die, it abideth alone ; but if it die, it 
bringeth forth much fruit." (John xii, 24.) It consists, 
in the second place, in continued repentance for our sin. 
"The whole life of the Christian," Luther writes, "is con- 
tinual repentance." It consists, in the third place, in 
each one's bearing the cross in the condition, station, and 
age into which God has placed him, whether the cross be 
of poverty or of riches, of disease or of health, of honor 
or of disgrace, of toilsome labor or of quiet waiting, of 
the praise of men, or of being misunderstood and des- 
pised by them; for, apart from God, anything in this 
world, even fortune, riches, and honor, may be a cross for 
Christians. From this imitation of Christ there will pro- 
ceed of themselves the breaking of bread for the hunger- 
ing, the clothing of the naked, the doing good in the 
spirit of Jesus according to every man's ability and sta- 
tion. Not, do good to the poor, in order that you may 
be Christians; but, become Christians, then doing good 
will result from within of itself, not as a duty, but as a 
natural enjoyment, like breathing or eating and drinking. 

The Christian socialists have not been successful in 
their attempts to reach the soul by caring for the body, 
and to reconcile the enemies of God with Christianity by 
improving their earthly lot. Even those ensnared in 
falsehood perceive the intention, and are disgusted. 
Therefore social democracy has plainly said. We use 
these "ogling elements" for our purposes, and despise 



THE BIBLE, 167 

them. There is no way to the human heart save the one 
pointed out by Christ ; and only the preaching of the Gos- 
pel can convert men, and make of them new men and 
children of God. "One thing is needful," and we expe- 
rience daily how those who make this one thing a sec- 
ondary matter in order to win men, fall away from Chris- 
tianity, and affiliate themselves with revolutionistic 
parties. 

The hope of Christian socialists that social reforms 
will cause poverty, war, and bodily and intellectual mis- 
ery to vanish, is a vain dream. This world, this earth, 
which for six thousand years has drunk the blood of the 
just and the tears of the oppressed, the atmosphere of 
which incessantly resounds with blasphemies and curses, 
with lies, obscenity, words of haughtiness and wrath, 
will not be made pure and holy by a little doing of good. 
It is incessantly approaching judgment and destruction 
by fire, as surely as with the sun it annually speeds sev- 
eral million miles on through the abysses of space. Then 
Jesus will come again. This He has plainly foretold. 
Therefore be "ye yourselves like unto men that wait for 
their lord." Then, indeed, He will take up the social 
question earnestly, and will carry it through in the mil- 
lennium and on the new earth, with a thoroughness, a 
power, and a wisdom that will confound all social re- 
formers. That is our hope. 

In the meantime it is written for us: "Take heed 
that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my 
name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many." 
"Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, 
or there; believe it not." (Matt, xxiv, 5, 23.) 

But Christ is not in need of our conceptions and pre- 



1 68 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

sentations; He is who He is. Culmann has well said of 
Him (Christliche Ethik, p. 259) : "The word of the Lord 
'I receive no testimony from man' (John v, 34), is valid 
in the entire absoluteness with which it is expressed. The 
sun is not in need of an oil-lamp in order to come to light ; 
it is made evident by itself. No testimony of John the 
Baptist combined with the testimony of the prophets of 
the Old Testament, of whom he is the last; neither the 
analytic scheme of the Gospel of Matthew, nor the syn- 
thetic of the Gospel of John ; no human art or science or 
logic; neither proof from the Scriptures, nor from mira- 
cles, is able to effect the conviction that God Himself 
begets in man through His kind indwelling." 

O Jesus, how differently dost Thou stand before us, 
Thy disciples, from before the world that is biased by 
falsehood! When, according to the divine counsel, the 
revolving ages had progressed far enough in the heavens 
of heavens; when Thy hour had come. Thou didst leave 
the glory which Thou didst have with the Father before 
the foundations of the world had been laid, and didst de- 
scend into this apostate world, sent of the Father, and 
impelled by ardent love, to seek and save them that were 
lost. God and man, Thou didst fulfill the law and the 
prophets without sin. Salvation and thanks be unto Thee, 
Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, and 
my sin ! Thanks be unto Thee that Thou didst redeem 
us, "who through fear of death were all our lifetime sub- 
ject to bondage," "from Him that had the power of 
death," "into the glorious liberty of the children of God." 
"To whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal 
life. And we believed, and are sure that Thou art that 
Christ, the Son of the living God." Thou hast opened 



THE BIBLE. 1^9 

our eyes, so that we see how this world, which despises 
Thee, and does not know Thee, has wasted its heritage, 
and is now herding the swine of its lusts. Now we wait 
for Thee and rejoice at Thy coming, laugh at our ene- 
mies, scorn the scornful, despise their despising, and look 
expectantly forward to the coming of Thy day. 

O Christ, Thou only begotten Son of God, born of the 
Virgin, God of God, light of light, born, and not created, 
of like substance with the Father, through whom all 
things are created, who for us didst come down from 
heaven, didst through the Holy Ghost become very man 
of the Virgin Mary; who wast crucified for us under 
Pontius Pilate, didst suffer and die, wast buried, didst 
rise again the third day according to the Scriptures, didst 
ascend into heaven, and sittest at the right hand of the 
Father, whence Thou wilt return again to judge the 
quick and the dead, — Thou, of whose kingdom there is 
no end, we salute Thee! Have mercy upon us! Kyrie 
eleison! 



III. 
OBJECTIONS. 

"Yea, hath God said." — GEN. Ill, 1. 

At all times there have been objections enough raised 
to this Bible. As early as in the Psalms of David and 
in the Prophets, one can see how the godless scoffed at 
the law and the promises of God. *'The Lord will do 
neither good nor evil!" they cried; and it came to be a 
byword of mockers that "the Lord is slack concerning 
His promise." 

In our day, doubts and objections shoot up like mush- 
rooms. Science is said to have shown that there is noth- 
ing in the Mosaic record of creation ; natural philosophy 
is said to have done away with miracles; Biblical criti- 
cisms is said to have proved that the books of Moses are 
spurious, etc. Biblical criticism proper we shall consider 
later on. For the present we select a few of the multitude 
of objections ' raised by such scholars as would be glad 
to believe. 

The view has become almost universal that to-day we 
can no longer hold the mediaeval conception of the in- 
spiration of the Holy Scriptures. 

Here we must reach out somewhat far. 

Our impersonal age has everywhere liked to see and 
hear clever and prudent diplomats, brilliant speakers and 
authors, amiable and intellectual men; and yet it forgot 
them, and let their memory die out after their death, and 

170 



OBJECTIONS. 171 

as soon as the aroma of their amiabihty had passed away. 
But where are the rock-firm, weather-hardened person- 
aHties with penetrating wrath, who stand by right and 
truth without precaution, forbearance, or consideration; 
whose yea is yea, and whose nay is nay, over against 
high or low; who during their hfetime wandered about 
unloved and unsought, and after their death were more 
and more missed and mourned, because it was perceived 
that they had afforded others also strength and support? 
We consider ourselves quite prudent and objective when 
we place the impersonal above the personal ; and consider 
ourselves wise when we divest God more and more of His 
personality, in order, under one name or another, to 
imagine Him an absolute being, as characterless as pos- 
sible. That is a misapprehension of the great truth that 
personality is above and beyond the impersonal. The 
true and heavenly world is and will be the efflux, the 
effect, and the manifestation of personalities. The good 
one is the cause of that which is good, and the evil one 
is the cause of that which is evil. Those who say that a 
thing is not good because God wills it, but God wills it 
because it is good, place something beyond and above 
God by which He must be governed. They make Him 
subject to that which is good, i. e., they deny God. "There 
is none" and nothing *'good but One; that is, God." That 
willed by Him is the good; that not willed by Him is 
the evil. The good is the emanation of a good being ; the 
evil is the creation of an evil being. In heaven there will 
emanate as a constant creation justice from the just God, 
holiness from the holy God, life from the living God, 
light from God, the uncreated light. A good thing with- 
out a good person, and an evil thing without an evil 



172 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

person, is just as absurd as love without a lover and a 
loved one. There are no principles or ideas v^ithout 
personality, and those who believe good and evil to be 
something impersonal floating about in space, are no 
wiser than the materialist who assumes that from eternity 
there have existed moral and immoral gases, virtuous 
and vicious molecules, or that morality and virtue, good 
and evil, are later and more complicated chemical combi- 
nations. But how eternal matter in the weariness of its 
eternity chanced upon the idea of the manufacture of 
virtue, and later upon the construction of the idea of God, 
are world-riddles, which even Haeckel is not able to 
solve; and equally inexplicable is the fanatical hatred en- 
tertained by him and his followers against this God, 
who, according to them, is merely a product of the 
mechanism of atoms, and of matter, so highly reverenced 
by them. And from their view of the world it will al- 
ways remain wonderful that the chemical and physical 
apparatus, called man, does not rest, before he believes 
in or denies a God, loves or hates Him, as is shown by 
these men themselves. 

A personality is a center of forces, which, wherever 
it may be, it consciously or unconsciously sends forth. 
It is a spirit, which is unceasingly influencing and en- 
thusing others for higher or for lower things; for in 
what else may the activity of a spirit consist? Thus 
God, as the highest personality, is the center from which 
the forces unceasingly stream that keep in motion the 
world, the universe, "the one thing that revolves;" the 
forces through which the creation once originated, and 
through which it now exists in eternal origination. But 
not only through so-called natural forces does He main- 



OBJECTIONS. ^73 

tain and animate the uiiiverse. These forces are only the 
effect, the emanation, of higher spiritual forces, with 
which He enthuses the universe, or, which is the same, 
constantly inspires it. Inspiration means "breathing into," 
and the universe would crumble into original nothing- 
ness if God ceased to breathe life and spirit into it con- 
tinually. This inspiration, in the first place, is an in- 
spiration of vital force in general. But to His children 
God promises His Spirit, the "holy" Spirit. Him He 
gives in greater measure to those whom He calls to do 
great deeds in His kingdom. "Holy men of God spake 
as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." How, then, 
does an ever less spiritual world, and, alas ! many a Chris- 
tian also, come to give up the inspiration of the Bible as 
an unintelligible and antiquated notion? If we accept a 
God at all, who is Spirit and reveals Himself to His 
creatures, the inspiration of the Bible is rather a conclu- 
sion so irresistible, and a concept so clear, that we should 
be obliged to construct it a priori if the Bible were silent 
concerning it. But this divine Word not only repeats a 
hundred-fold, "And the word of the Lord came to," 
but says expressly, "/ will put My words in his 
mouth/' This we call inspiration. Even the heathen 
knew that "there are words given by inspiration from 
above." Inspiration through the Holy Ghost is a tem- 
porary enhancement through the Holy Ghost of the divine 
in man up to such communion and oneness with God 
that man of himself speaks divine words. But since God 
never annuls the laws of the individuality that He has 
created, and just as in heaven Isaiah will eternally speak 
other words than Daniel, and John than Paul, this in- 
spiration manifests itself in man only within the formula 



174 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

of his soul. It can not inspire him with any untruth; 
but it can impart more or less to him, and of the infinite 
aspects of the Godhead it will constantly reveal through 
him those which are most akin to his ego^ and which, 
through the different inspired men of God, illuminate 
different parts of the great plan of creation and redemp- 
tion, as with an electric reflector. God never reveals 
Himself fully to any creature, but only to the Son. But 
"damnable unbelief and the miserable flesh," Luther says, 
"do not permit us to see nor to take into account that in 
the Scriptures God is speaking to us, or that it is the 
Word of God; but we think it is Isaiah, Paul, or some 
other evil man, who has not created heaven and earth." 

Inability to believe in inspifation is a natural and 
explicable appearance in our age. The lack of spirit in 
our life, in our art and literature, in our social conditions, 
must necessarily beget such inability to believe in the 
power and ability of the Spirit. Our entire modern life, 
viewed candidly, is nothing but a continual admiration 
of self; a lauding of self, of our knowledge and ability, 
our power, our wisdom, our reason, our wealth ; in short, 
a constant adoration of self. How can the Spirit of God 
breathe through men so entirely steeped in self-love? 
Who constantly lives in a calm, can not believe in the 
roaring storm. But when again "the four winds of 
heaven shall strive upon the great sea" of nations (Dan. 
vii, 2), then Christians will again believe in divine and in 
Satanic inspiration. 

We still believe in inspiration, many Christians say, 
but no longer in the now untenable verbal inspiration of 
the Scriptures (as if the latter had not at all times seemed 
to the wisdom of man to be untenable). And we say, 



OBJECTIONS. 175 

We care little for an inspiration that is not verbal. If 
one would lay hold on such inspiration, it is volatilized to 
fog or to a mere impulse of the Spirit to speak good and 
true words, such an impulse as Augustine and Luther 
also felt. To the fervent longings and questionings of the 
soul — where it may find sure, firm, absolute, even verbal, 
literal, not human, but divine truth — it answers: The 
Bible contains inspired and uninspired parts, parts en- 
tirely true, and parts partly true, sayings inspired of God, 
and others expressed by pious men in their own manner, 
parts of greater and of lesser value side by side; the 
thought is sure, but the wording of it is not; it might 
just as well have been expressed differently. Here, too, 
a mistaking of the absolute value of the Word^ and of 
eveiy word. We say. If the word wavers, the sense 
wavers. But if we are to determine what parts of the 
Bible are inspired or not, according as their content seems 
to us to be important or unimportant, to pertain to the 
history of salvation or not, we constitute ourselves mas- 
ters of the Word, and are at the mercy of our own 
caprice, and that of others. What shall I do w4th this 
semi-faith in a semi-truth? Where and how shall I 
distinguish? At every w^ord of Scripture I feel myself 
again benighted by doubts. 

Faith in verbal inspiration, many believing Christains 
exclaim concernedly, is repulsive to people. Indeed, if 
repulsion is to be avoided, many things must be changed, 
and a wide field opened for inoffensive exposition. But 
we do not see that Christ feared lest he might repel His 
listeners, or that He in any way took pains to make truth 
more acceptable and credible to them. Even His disci- 
ples said, "This is a hard saying" — and it was — "who 



17^ THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD. 

can hear it?" And "from that time many of His disci- 
ples went back^ and walked no more with Him." But 
Jesus did not take back a single word, did not explain 
Himself, but asked, "Will ye also go away?" (John vi.) 
He who fears lest he repel people is on the way to seek- 
ing praise of people. 

Do we not perceive, even in man, that the higher and 
more powerful enthusiasm floods and flames from within 
and without, the more it inspires the exact word, and no 
other? Do we separate the words of our classic writers 
from their spirit, and allow ourselves carelessly to trans- 
late their words into ever3^-day language? Do we not, 
on the contrary, seek most diligently for their original 
setting? But when the Divine Word is in question, the 
blind cry in a chorus : God can not. How shall he do it ? 
Or they speak childishly of a "dictation," of "involun- 
tary tools," and thereby show that they have no concep- 
tion of the nature and power of inspiration. But, of 
course, how shall he who never felt inspired, as in prayer, 
understand verbal inspiration ? The word is the visibility 
and the form of the spirit. Is form a mere secondary 
matter in Goethe's "Iphigenia," or in Michael Angelo's 
Moses, or in the head of Juno Ludovisi, or in the Par- 
thenon, or in the Cathedral of Cologne? Can we sepa- 
rate it in these from the spirit? No. The same is true 
of the Word of God. "Le style c'est I'homme" and those 
who think nothing depends on the mere word, do not 
know how their mental poverty and thoughtlessness is 
reflected in their slovenly and clumsy speech, in their 
stereotype expressions, and unfitting adjectives. "By 
thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou 
shalt be condemned." Every improvement in man is 



OBJECTIONS. ^77 

manifest in an improvement of his speech. How, then, 
if in certain moments he is divine! 

Shall we not all some day in heaven be truly, fully, 
and wholly inspired? Will not the Spirit of God, yea, 
the seven spirits that flash before His throne, there breathe 
through us and set us aglow, so that, being drunken with 
divine wisdom, being intoxicated with divine power and 
bliss, we shall speak nothing but divine words, full of 
truth, infallible, creative, omnipotent, because they are 
of God ? And here it seems so hard to us to believe in a 
drop of this sea of spirit, in a spark of this ocean of tire. 
Lord, grant us a breath of Thy Spirit, in order that we 
may believe in Him ! 

He who can not rise to the mental conception of a 
complete divine inspiration ought, at least, to reach the 
faith that the God whose providence extends to sparrows 
and to the hairs of our head, willed that a Book, by 
means of which He desired to lead many millions of souls 
from darkness to light, should be written so, and not 
otherwise. But He wants to lead men to Himself by 
truth, not by falsehood. 

But, exclaim many, you do not mean to say that, e. g., 
the Mosaic record of creation is also true? Indeed, I 
mean to say just that. I believe every word of this 
record, if for no other reason than that I am absolutely 
unable to see why I should not believe it, although, or 
because, I have read many scholarly works on cosmogony, 
geology, and astronomy. I believe that we shall some 
day, in the light of eternity, behold truths and depths in 
it that far surpass all cosmogonies and cosmologies of 
all nations and all scholars. I believe every word of it, 
because it seems to me to be inconsistent, yea, absurd to 

12 



178 THE BIBLU THE WORD OP GOD. 

say: I believe in God, the Creator of heaven and earth, 
and I also believe that the Bible is a revelation of this 
Creator to His creatures, but I do not believe that this 
Creator's relation of how He created the world and us is 
true. I believe in it, because it seems equally inconsis- 
tent to me to say: Well, but God did not write this; 
Moses wrote it. Why did God not, from the very first, 
prevent his promulgating erroneous views concerning 
creation, and his thus deceiving millions? If it is true 
that this Moses spake with Jehovah face to face, that for 
forty days he held intimate converse with Jehovah on 
Sinai, and that Jehovah there showed him the exact 
model of the tabernacle, it would be inconceivable, yea, 
unpardonable, if this Jehovah did not give Moses in- 
structions, however brief, for writing his important cos- 
mogony. If the record of creation represents only the 
personal views of Moses at that time, then I ask modestly. 
Why did God permit him to begin His Word with such 
antiquated stuff, of which He foreknew that, in the en- 
lightened twentieth century, it would be a stumbling- 
block to all educated persons? 

Well, many Christians say, and thereby put them- 
selves at ease, "We shall not be judged according to our 
faith in the story of creation." Have you that in writ- 
ing? I, for my part, would not want to swear to it. The 
word, "I say unto you, that every idle word that men 
shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of 
judgment," shows that judgment will be more minute 
and precise than we usually suppose. If every word 
shall be examined, whether idle, why shall not every word 
be examined that you spoke with premeditation and from 
conviction? With what intention you spoke, to please 



OBJECTIONS, 179 

whom, whether to appear amiable or clever, courageous or 
learned or cultured, whether to gain material advantage, 
whether you said all, what you kept secret and why, in 
what connection with that which preceded and that which 
followed, in what relation to your position, your station, 
your age, your vocation, your sex, your training, your 
health or illness, in what tone of voice, and with what 
mien, — all this must be examined into and taken into ac- 
count, if the sentence is to be a just one. Then ought 
not every word of ours concerning the Word of God in 
its connection Avith our faith, our works, our entire view 
of the world, and our hfe to be called to account? Is 
not every such word a confession? Then shall faith in 
a part of the Scriptures count for less and be less im- 
portant than an idle and unpremeditated little word of 
man, which probably dies away at once, having remained 
ineffectual? No! True, in this trial faith in Christ is 
the condition without which no one will be admitted to 
the examination. ''He that believeth not is condemned 
already ;" all that remains in his case is announcement of 
the sentence, and execution. But, in accordance with the 
Scriptures, I believe in a thorough examination that 
searches heart and reins, and pertains to all deeds, words, 
and thoughts of the Christian in his earthly life. The 
Bible teaches that standing and achievement in various 
* 'branches" will be taken into account, as, e. g., spiritual 
poverty, hunger, and thirst after righteousness, mercy, 
peaceableness, heart purity, suffering persecution, love of 
God and the brethren, patience, hope, humility, the use 
of various talents and gifts, good works^ and likewise 
also faith in the Bible. The examination in the last 
branch may well cover the entire Bible from A to Z, and 



i8o THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

it will hardly be possible for any one to offer the excuse 
that he h?.d not believed that he would be judged accord- 
ing to his faith in the story of creation, or in the Book of 
Kings, or Job, or according to his faith in Revelation, 
which no one understands correctly anyhow. The reply 
v/ould be: It is written, "All Scripture is given by in- 
spiration of God ;" and concerning this last book, "Blessed 
is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this 
prophecy." For Moses, Jesus demands full faith, and 
does not except the first chapters. He teaches that who- 
soever shall break one of these least commandments, and 
shall teach men so, shall be called the least in the kingdom 
of heaven. He speaks of a jot that shall not pass from 
the law; He demands that our speech be yea, yea, nay, 
nay; just so our faith, too; just so, too, our answer in 
the day of His judgment, and not, if, and but, partly and 
to a certain extent. And thus full, entire faith in the 
Bible may some day receive a higher reward than half a 
faith. 

"Tut, tut!" many exclaim, impatient with such faith 
in the Bible, "all that is rigid faith in the letter of the 
Scriptures; one must know how to distinguish between 
the word and the spirit, must not cleave to the word, but 
search out the spirit of it!" Indeed, a spiritless word! 
Whoever speaks thus, understands neither the word nor 
the spirit nor their connection^ which is the more inti- 
mate, the higher the spirit is. Christ says, "The words 
that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life," 
and exhorts a hundred-fold, "Believe My words!" not 
My spirit. "If ye continue in My word." "The word 
that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last 
day." (John xii, 48.) 



OBJECTIONS. i8i 

There is only one word for each thing (hence, "to 
call a thing by its right name"), and only one expression 
for each truth. Whoever is not exact in the use of the 
word, and thinks he can express the truth just as well 
so or so, conceals and effaces it, and robs it of some of 
its power. We all do this, more or less, when we ex- 
pound the Word of God, and elucidate and explain it by 
means of our word. What a great thing every word is ; 
how it is connected with the entire language; what a 
world of ideas it is ! There might be a book written on 
each one, even on "in," "for," "against," "but," and their 
role and operation in the language; on "I," "thou," "he," 
"she," and especially when there are brought into connec- 
tion "I" and "thou," "he" and "she;" or on words like 
"to go," "to stand," "to see," "to hear," "to do," "to 
think," "to live," "to die." After all, are not all books 
that men have ever written mere paraphrases of and re- 
flections on the words light, darkness, spirit, day, night, 
sea, land, plant, sun, moon, animal, man, soul, etc., which 
God once spoke? But in our day words and writings 
flow about us incessantly, and we speak and read and 
write so much and on so many subjects, that we no longer 
have time to think about the word and its value. 

To this mistaking and disregarding of the Word is 
due the fact, that when the reality and plasticity of the 
Bible causes them anxiety, so many Christians of our 
day, and teachers of the Word, too, at once think, "That 
must be understood spiritually." This is one of the neat- 
est inventions of him who is a liar from the beginning 
to paralyze the Word of God, and to weaken its influence 
even with Christians. In this he has been very success- 
ful among pious people — yea, especially among these — 



1 82 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

and has cradled thousands into quiet slumbers; for he 
does not fear allegories; he knows that no one is really 
afraid of an allegorical, a figurative hell, and that no one 
really longs for an allegorical, purely intellectual heaven. 
He, His power, and His kingdom are too dreadfully real 
to be shaken by paper arrows, and by interpretations that 
are full of imaginings. But the fatal passion to resolve 
personalities to mythical persons, dogmas to changeable 
views of the age, divine laws to parables, is in keeping 
with the weakness of a generation which more and more 
puts temporary sensibility in the place of law, humane- 
ness in the place of justice, philanthropy in the place of 
Christianity, tolerance in the place of confession, and 
social questions in the place of questions pertaining to 
eternity. 

It is divine prophecy especially, about which even 
Christians, possessed of this spirit, busily weave their 
veil, in order to hide from themselves and others the un- 
comfortable light of its countenance. We have seen that, 
up to the present time, prophecy has been fulfilled literally 
and in its smallest detail ; e. g., that pertaining to Babylon 
and Nineveh, Tyre, and Egypt, the life and sufferings of 
Jesus, the Jewish nation. This these Christians do not 
deny; they rather point triumphantly, and justly so, to 
this literal fulfillment, as to a strong proof for the truth 
of the Scriptures. But they want to hear nothing of a 
literal fulfillment of that part of prophecy that has as yet 
not been fulfilled. All that is yet future, is to be under- 
stood as figurative and spiritual ! Has Babylon been con- 
verted only figuratively and spiritually into a heap of 
ruhis and a retreat for jackals? Did Christ die only 
figuratively on the cross? Did he drink spiritual vine- 



OBJECTIONS. I S3 

gar, and were His spiritual garments divided by lot ? Or 
has God only figuratively scattered His people among all 
nations? And is it now only figuratively without king, 
without prince, without sacrifice, without altar, without 
ephod, and without sanctuary, as God had threatened? 
No ; all this came to pass literally and really. Why, then, 
when God, a hundred times over, affirms to His prophets, 
and swears by Himself, that "He will gather His people 
from all the nations, whither He has driven them, and 
will bring them back into the country that He sware to 
give unto their fathers," do they assert that these are 
merely figurative expressions? and why do they "spirit- 
ualize" these glorious and minute prophecies through in- 
significant interpretation ? 

And these of weak faith prudently teach us to be sure 
to guard against a literal faith in the Word. Thus a 
theologian writes concerning the first resurrection (Rev. 
XX, 5) : "We dare think only of souls" (resurrected 
souls!) "and must guard against holding this to be a 
resurrection of the body. That would open the way to 
dangerous fanaticisms." We^ who believe in the Bible, 
despise such anxiety, and say : If it is written that such 
and such "dead lived ; and that the rest of the dead lived 
not again until the thousand years were finished; this is 
the first resurrection," this means that some of the dead 
(see also Dan. xii, 2) will rise again, and others will not 
rise again — "and will live and reign with Christ a thou- 
sand years." If the author referred to above takes the 
two witnesses of Revelation to be Luther and Calvin, or 
the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches; if others take 
them to be the law and the prophets, or the Old and the 
New Testament, we say, Away with such weak and inco- 



1 84 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

incident interpretation of the Scriptures! Even this dif- 
ference of contradictory views shows that their exposi- 
tions are not true; for there is no longer any doubt con- 
cerning any fulfilled prophecy; e. g., that pertaining to 
Babylon. Did Luther and Calvin have fire fall from 
heaven, or change water into blood, as Moses and Elijah 
and the two witnesses in Revelation xi, 6, did? Were 
they killed in the city where also our Lord was crucified, 
and did, at their death, they that dwell upon the earth 
rejoice over them and send gifts one to another? (Rev. 
xi, 8, lo.) No, that will be fulfilled literally in the two 
witnesses. This we call a calm, sober, clear faith in the 
Bible; a faith that honors God and His Word. On the 
other hand, we reject the above and similar spiritualiz- 
ing of the Scriptures as arbitrary and subjective notions, 
and as dangerous fanaticism. We know full well that 
the Word also has a spiritual sense; indeed, we believe 
that Christ's thirsting and his drinking vinegar, and other 
details, which all came to pass, in order "that the Scrip- 
tures might be fulfilled," have a sense so deep that only 
angels and the redeemed can know it; but we believe in 
a fulfillment of future things just as literal as of past 
things, even though they are reflected before their definite 
fulfillment in certain facts and in spiritual conditions, 
which is usually true of prophecy. Is God's arm short- 
ened that He should not be able to do such things in His 
time ? 

The confounding of Israel with the Church, and the 
spiritualizing of promises given it to images of the glor- 
ious conditions of present-day Christianity, has, like 
all error, had a soporific and spiritually paralyzing effect. 
Israel is not the Church, and will not be the Church in 



OBJECTIONS, 1S5 

heaven. Beautifully, and answering to body, soul, and 
spirit, the Scriptures distinguish three stages of human- 
ity as related to God. Firstly, the nations, to whom is 
given the natural law, — the same that was given to Adam, 
but which shone forth much more brightly in paradisaic 
nature (Rom. ii, 14-16), — who are judged according to 
the same (Matt, xxv, 32), and over whom we Christians 
shall rule in the new earth (Rev. ii, 26, 27). Secondly, 
the people of Israel, chosen from these nations, to whom 
the law of Sinai and the promise of future world-glory 
was given. Thirdly, Christians, the congregation and 
bride of the Lamb, from all tongues and nations, to whom 
is promised persecution and tribulation on earth, and a 
reigning and ruling with Christ in heaven. These three 
grades will be found again in the new heaven and the new 
earth; they are eternal, as is also the fulfillment of the 
promises given them. To Israel, and not to the Church, 
are given the promises of the Old Testament. The mys- 
tery of the Church, the calling of the nations, was not 
revealed to the prophets (Eph. iii, 3-6; Col. i, 26), and 
this in itself is a reason why their words can not be ap- 
plied to the Church. With such confounding we have 
lulled ourselves into unreal dreams, and close our eyes 
against clear facts. The earth is now not "filled with 
the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters 
cover the sea," and it is quite necessary to say, "Know 
the Lord;" for they do not know Him. Darkness still 
covers the nations, — several hundred millions of heathen, 
Buddhists, Mohammedans. Else why missions? But 
their progress is far and constantly surpassed by the in- 
crease of the population of the earth. According to the 
newest statistical reports of the Statistical Society of 



1 86 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

London, the population of Europe has increased from 
two hundred and sixteen milhons to four hundred mil- 
hons within the last seventy years, and the population of 
the earth from eight hundred and forty-seven millions to 
one thousand six hundred millions. How insignificant, 
compared with these numbers, are numerically a few thou- 
sand or hundred thousand converts ! Thus infidelity and 
heathendom are incessantly spreading, and we are not 
drifting toward the conversion of the w^orld, but toward 
the foretold apostasy. (Luke xviii, 8; xvii, 26-29, et al.) 
The nations, the Christian, too, are not forging plow- 
shares from their swords, but vice versa. The constant 
wars wdthin the past nineteen hundred years, the perse- 
cutions of Christians, from the Roman emperors to the 
Armenian, the horrors of the Inquisition, the thirty years' 
war, and the French revolution with its dismissal of God, 
are not the results of Satan's being bound, nor images and 
fruits of the peaceful and glorious kingdom of the Mes- 
siah promised to Israel. We know well that, in the elect, 
a kingdom of peace and joy will be effected through the 
Holy Ghost, and also that by virtue of the great harmony 
in the one God all external things answer to spiritual 
things, and that in so far we have power to use the glo- 
rious promises given to Israel, as images of inner spiritual 
states; but it is a harmful delusion and a weakening of 
the Word of God to assert that these spiritual states are 
a full realization and fulfillment of these prophecies. 
Whoever reads with unbiased mind Jer. xxxii and xxxiii, 
and the glorious closing words of the prophets — c. g., 
Isaiah Ixvi, 18-24; Ezekiel xxxviii, xxxix, and xl, xlviii; 
Hosea xiv; Joel ii and iii; Amos ix, 11-15; Obadiah 
17-21; Micah vii, 11-20; Zephaniah iii, 8-20; Zechariab 



OBJECTIONS. 187 

xiv; Mai. iv, 1-6 — can not evade the operpowering nii- 
pression that more than images are given here. Surely, 
these do not refer to our Protestant State Churches; 
Jehovah did not promise to give these unto Abraham, 
Isaac, and Jacob; it is not this that he swore a hundred 
times over by Himself to give unto His people; for the 
Israel of to-day has little enough of this, and we, too, 
would refuse to accept such an incomplete, actually not 
existing fulfillment of the Word. But some day, after 
Israel, having been called back out of all nations, recog- 
nizes Christ as the promised Messiah and King, and la- 
ments its rejection (Zech. xii, i-io), there will come up 
to Zion in Christ's millennium, not the resurrected Chris- 
tians, but the nations to worship, and will send ambassa- 
dors to the feast of tabernacles in the temple of Ezekiel ; 
and whatever people will not do this, ''upon them shall 
be no rain, saith the Lord." ''The law shall go forth of 
Zion." And in the new earth the resurrected David will 
be king of Israel eternally, as God swore unto him. 

But miracles ! Ah yes ! these wicked miracles, of 
which the Bible is full from beginning to end! If God 
wanted to perform miracles, at all events he might have 
kept them secret, at least the most incredible among them, 
e. g.j Balaam's ass, Jonah in the belly of the fish, for He 
certainly foresaw that it would make faith in His Word 
impossible for a later, advanced, enlightened age and free 
theology ! But there they stand, in closed ranks, reported 
in all earnestness and simplicity by eye-witnesses; and 
the entire life of Jesus, from His birth to His resurrec- 
tion, is represented to us as a continuous chain of miracles. 

How now? 

In the first chapter we saw that science, as a whole. 



1 88 THB BIB LB THB WORD OP GOD, 

stands before the origin of the worid, before the origin 
of organic life and of self-consciousness, as before unsolv- 
able riddles, and has abandoned the hope of ever solving 
them. Darwin himself candidly confesses, *'The entire 
process of the development of life is the manifestation of 
a power which, for the human mind, is absolutely inscru- 
table." That this universe exists, is the wonder of won- 
ders. Whence came it? Who made it? How did it 
originate? It matters not whether we take refuge in the 
utterly inconceivable assumption that it has existed from 
eternity, or whether we say that it originated of itself, 
or was created by a God, we are placed before the miracle 
of origin as before the Father from whom we and all 
things have come. We have originated from the miracle. 

But the existence of this universe, which seems "nat- 
ural" to us, is as wonderful and miraculous as its origin. 
We can no more comprehend the continuous generation 
of organisms and of life in general than we can compre- 
hend the primal origin of organic life. The primal 
origin of consciousness is no greater a riddle than its ex- 
istence, and than the fact that the food I ate a few hours 
ago now takes part in my thought and joy and sorrow. 
Our existence is a miracle also. "All quite natural and 
simple!" exclaim the superficial. But natural is derived 
from "nature," and this nature is the great, incomprehen- 
sible miracle. We live in the miracle. 

Passing away and dying, also, the suddenly manifest 
difference between a living and a dead person, the ceasing 
and being no more, of that which was, is a miracle. How- 
ever much we may try, perhaps at the sickbed of a loved 
one, to familiarize ourselves with the thought of death, 
it always appears as something unexpected and incom^ 



OBJECTIONS. 189 

prehensible ; and to the murderer who grows pale before 
his victim, it appears as a miracle of hell. 

Whether in this ocean of divine miracle, in which we 
arise, exist, and pass away as miraculous products, single 
waves ever and ever rise as particular and extraordinary 
miracles ; whether at one time an animal (do I know what 
an animal is?) uttered a few intelligible sounds; whether 
among millions of wonderfully generated men a few rise 
again; whether a divine spirit subdues the sea, which at 
one time came into existence through the spirit (do I 
know what atoms of water or natural forces are?), — all 
this seems to me to be unusual, indeed, but not impossi- 
ble, and does not confound me. But to me it seems folly 
to appeal to reason in negating it, as though reason could 
judge concerning things of which it does not and can 
not know anything. That their entire conception of the 
world shrivels up more and more, and the world seems 
to them to be boarded up, is a just punishment of those 
who place their little reason upon the throne, and make 
it the only valid criterion for God and the world. 

With accustomed superficiality the man of the world 
also treats miracles, either at once disdainfully dismiss- 
ing them as *'silly stuff," or ascribing to God and His Son 
a few smaller and easier miracles, as a well-known Berlin 
professor does, but energetically protesting against the 
greater and more difficult ones. Confounded he sits be- 
fore Lot's wife and Balaam's ass, like one who has never 
before seen an egg, and now takes one, opens it, and ex- 
claims: "What! am I to believe that, simply by virtue 
of a certain degree of warmth in the incubator there will 
come forth from this slimy white and yellow fluid a per- 
fect animal that can walk and fly and cackle? Why, 



I90 THU BIB LB THE WORD OP GOD. 

whence shall feathers, and feet with claws, and the hard 
bill come? I shall never believe such stuff." For in the 
presence of this fact^ as well as of thousands of others, 
science as a whole is as helpless as in the presence of the 
miracles of the Bible. But we wise people consider the 
miracle ''quite simple and natural" that is repeated daily, 
and deny it if it occurs only once within a hundred or a 
thousand years. 

Here, too, the believer reasons from another and a 
higher position than the unbeliever. That faith in a liv- 
ing God — and that a God must be a living God, does not 
require proof — includes faith in miracles, is self-evident 
for him, and he says with J. J. Rousseau, "Whoever says 
that God can not perform miracles, ought to be in an in- 
sane asylum." The Christian lays hold on the root of 
miracles instead of criticising every wonderful fact and 
the report thereof. He knows that this material world 
and all its phenomena are the fruit and effect of the spir- 
itual world; that therefore the material is secondary, the 
spiritual primary. Even so in the miracles of Christ. 
Whether the man that was born blind could see for a few 
years ; whether Lazarus lived a few years longer ; whether 
a leper was temporarily healed or not, is of itself and for 
the history of the world a matter quite unimportant. The 
matter of primary importance was the reference to the 
power of Jesus to do this, to His higher power to forgive 
sin, and thereby His legitimation as the Son of God. 
Therefore those who deny His Deity also, of necessity, 
deny His miracles. But the Christian has experienced in 
himself a spiritual miracle, grander, more radical, and of 
more immeasurable (because eternal) importance than 
if all the asses in the world should begin to speak, or all 
the trees of the forest to sing. On his precipitous path 



OBJECTIONS. 191 

he, an immortal, divine being, an entire eternal spiritual 
world, was seized by an omnipotent hand, hardly know- 
ing what was happening to him, and, behold! he rises 
toward the clear sun again, a new creature; a deed far 
greater, eternally far more important, than if a new con- 
tinent had risen from the floods of the ocean; a deed of 
God, a miracle, understood only by him who has expe- 
rienced it. Now this child of God carries the miracle in 
himself, is himself a miracle, and can believe in miracles. 
He whom God has not converted to Himself can not be- 
lieve in miracles, and, at its best, his faith in miracles is, 
like that of pious heathen, a dismal anticipation of the 
incalculable operations of good and evil powers. 

He who does not believe in miracles does not believe 
in God, but has instead an unreal notion, an impotent, 
indefinite something to which it were senseless and use- 
less to pray, and which is more powerless, even, than all 
the idols of the heathen; for the heathen felt that a God 
without miracles would be a chimera that could profit 
nothing. Such a one^ man can neither fear nor love. 
But men do not want to believe in miracles because they 
do not ^vant to believe in God; one follows from the 
other. 

Therefore it is not the miracle, as such, that repulses 
the unbeliever ; in poetry, in art, on the stage, in *'Rhein- 
Gold," and in '^der Gdtterddmmerung'' he does not ob- 
ject to fables and miracles, employs terms like wonder- 
ful, wondrously beautiful, miraculous, as expressions of 
ecstasy, and admires the beautiful and the grand. Indeed, 
as all the actions, imaginings, and strivings of man are a 
continuous, even though involuntary, confirmation of the 
Word of God, even so the very man who ridicules divine 



192 THE BIB LB THB WORD OP GOD. 

miracles is unceasingly in quest of wonders of art, science, 
industry, and progress. He, too, would like to rise into 
the skies, change stones to bread, strike water from the 
rock, silence storms and waves, speak in thunders, make 
the lightning and the ray of light his servants, conquer 
disease and death, in short would like to imitate God, 
and proclaims, by his inexterminable desire for wonders, 
that he has been created for miracles. 

But the Biblical miracle, the miracle to the honor of 
God, the miracle as immediate action of a personal God, 
is obnoxious to him, and must under no conditions be 
believed in. The reason can easily be seen. A world- 
machine that runs correctly and regularly, like a wound 
clock, by virtue of the mechanism of atoms, is much more 
composing and comfortable than a personal, just God, 
who is jealous of His honor, whose flaming eye examines 
my heart and my reins day and night, whose hand may at 
any time nab me in the neck, and who this very night may 
thunder a "hither, and be judged !" at me, instead of let- 
ting me quietly be resolved into my chemical elements. 
And therefore all one may say to such concerning mira- 
cles profits little. They will still repeat in chorus: I 
shall never believe in miracles, because, . . . once 
for all, I do not want to believe in them. Theoretically I 
believe that God is omnipotent, but in practice I do not. 
He may at one time have created the world, but I can 
prove to him scientifically, that he can not encroach on 
this world ad libitum. I am absolutely unable to harmon- 
ize it with reason, and it is not in keeping with the con- 
ceptions of the present age that this Almighty Creator 
of heaven and earth should be able to reign so freely and 
according to His own pleasure in His own house. 



OBJECTIONS. 193 

And even Christians can say in public addresses : "A 
God who performs miracles is to me an unintelligible, 
frightful power, not the Father in heaven." ''I can 
not imagine that our Father in heaven should be obliged 
to repair a world created by Himself." What a superfi- 
cial, mechanical conception of the work of a living God, 
as a one-time world-fabrication! Their hearts full of 
dread and longing, the children of this Father look up to 
him, and lift petitioning hands toward heaven. But He 
can not help them, can not comfort them, can not gladden 
them by an extra gift ; for every answer to prayer would 
be a miracle, a mending of His world, and this ruined 
world, depraved by sin, needs no mending. Poor Father, 
poor children! But why did Christ come into a world 
which our Father in heaven does not want to mend ? Then 
why a redemption at all ? 

Further discussion is impossible. This much, how- 
ever, even the most simple-minded can see : that whoever 
denies miracles at all^ makes all the authors of Biblical 
books liars, and stamps the Bible an old book of fables; 
a view which, indeed, is shared by enlightened science, and 
also by modern Bible critics. Bible and Christianity 
stand and fall with miracles. It is rather unimportant, 
however, that among sixteen hundred millions of people 
a few thousand enlightened persons teach, and a few hun- 
dred thousand repeat after them, that God can not per- 
form miracles. That will not hinder the eternal Majesty 
from exercising His sovereign rights according to His 
pleasure. "The Lord laughs at them." But we, His chil- 
dren, have a God and Father who can perform miracles, 
and we rejoice in His works. 

Further, many say: "The Bible certainly contains 
13 



194 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

much that is unnecessary. What shall I do, e. g., with 
the many genealogies?" Well, what narrow pride is 
this, that is ever relating the whole world to itself! 
Where is it written that God had written His Book solely 
for you and me? For us it may be quite unimportant 
whose name stood in the "golden book" of the nobility 
of Venice ; but for them and their descendants it was and 
is of very great importance. Would to God that my name 
and yours stood in His book of nobility, read even by 
angels ! What if this Bible were a duplicate and copy of 
a heavenly Bible, containing the legal documents of God, 
in which is written what is important to God, "for an 
eternal memorial before the Lord?" Then every name, 
yea, every word in it would have an eternal meaning, 
and not be understood this side of heaven. Thus the 
mighty angel prince of Persia says to Daniel, "I will 
show thee that which is noted in the book of truth" (Dan. 
X, 21 ), i. e., in the heavenly Bible. See also Malachi: 
"The Lord heard, and a book of remembrance was writ- 
ten before Him." (Mai. iii, i6.) 

The objection that the Bible contains much that is 
useless is refuted for the Christian by the words of Christ 
already cited : "But I say unto you, that every idle word 
that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in 
the day of judgment." If the Bible contains idle things, 
I can reply in the day of judgment : O God, in Thy Word 
Thou hast Thyself spoken many idle words, the story of 
Thy creation, which, as I hear, does not harmonize at all 
with science, also the many genealogies and repetitions, 
etc. ; and if Thou didst not speak them Thyself, Thou 
didst have them proclaimed for centuries by Thy holy 
men to many millions; and now Thou dost demand of 



OBJECTIONS, 195 

me, that I, one of the least, should not have spoken a 
single idle word during my entire lifetime. 

It is said that the Bible contains evident errors, e. g., 
in historic dates. Well, no earnest investigator any longer 
scoffs at Biblical chronology. The fifty thousand or one 
hundred thousand or "unnumbered thousands" of years of 
the human race, which originated in the mind of several 
scholars, but which never have been proved, have passed 
away; and, indeed, they are impossible for psychological 
and other reasons. This is admitted by the historian of 
materialism, Albert Lange, who continues, "If Professor 
Fraas restricts himself to periods of time that remain 
within the six thousand years of the Biblical story of 
creation, there can be no well-founded objection raised." 
(Geschichte des Materialismus^ Vol. II, p 317.) The 
theory of man's descent from the ape is coming more and 
more to be a thing of the past. The oldest skulls — e. g., 
those of Cromagnon — show a facial angle as beautiful as 
that of the average inhabitant of Paris or Berlin, and a 
somewhat greater brain capacity. We know now, e. g., 
that the lake dwellings {Pfahlhauten), begun about one 
thousand years before Christ, as well as the stone age 
among other peoples, continued centuries after Christ; 
that just as even now there are many savage nations 
alongside our civilization — yea, just as the inhabitants of 
once highly civilized countries like Mesopotamia, Egypt, 
North Africa, have grown savage again — so in the days 
of the mighty empires of Memphis, Nineveh, Babylon, 
Tyre, Carthage, there were cave-dwellers and low tribes, 
which were banished by civilized nations. The historic 
past of Europe does not reach back two thousand years 
before Christ, and although Champollion dated the be- 



19^ THE BIB LB THB WORD OP GOD, 

ginning of Egyptian history under King Mena, or Menes, 
from 5867 before Christ, this number was reduced by in- 
vestigators more and more, until Wilkinson — whether he 
is right or not, we do not know — arrived at the year 2320 
before Christ. It also seems that traditions of the history 
of the world before the flood, which, as might be expected, 
Noah and his sons in their long life had handed down to 
their descendants, had been used; and it is said that 
Egyptian records often distinguish between history be- 
fore and after the flood. 

As far as other supposed errors in Biblical dates are 
concerned, it is here the ignorant again who are at once 
ready to pass judgment. He who is better informed, and 
who has examined the records of history, is more careful, 
and knows that seeming contradictions are not always 
real. An instructive example of how two supposedly ir- 
reconcilable dates nevertheless can both be correct is af- 
forded by the Biblical report of Hezekiah's tribute to Sen- 
nacherib, compared with the discovered full account of 
Sennacherib concerning his campaign. The Bible says, 
''And the king of Assyria appointed unto Hezekiah, king 
of Judah, three hundred talents of silver and thirty tal- 
ents of gold." (2 Kings xviii, 14.) But Sennacherib 
relates that he had received thirty talents of gold, but 
eight hundred talents of silver. Criticism could easily 
assume that the Jewish writer had been prompted by pa- 
triotism to reduce the amount ; or without further ado the 
well-known "error in writing" was here also accepted. 
But more recent Assyriology says : "The silver talent of 
Palestine was exactly eight thirds of the Babylonian sil- 
ver talent ; the talent of gold, however, was alike in both 
countries." (Basil Evetts.) Therefore Hezekiah's three 



I 



OBJECTIONS, 197 

hundred talents were exactly eight hundred for Sennach- 
erib. (Urquhart, Die neueren Entdeckungen und die 
Bihel, Vol IV.) See also in the same work the explana- 
tion of Gad's seven and three years of famine, and the 
difference in the amount paid by David to Oman (pp. 
31-35). In this simple manner full knowledge of things 
would often harmonize apparent contradictions. Thus 
reports of a battle may vary in the enumeration of the 
troops engaged and of the soldiers killed, because in the 
one report only the country's own legions are counted, 
as was customary with the Romans, and in the other also 
the alien auxiliary troops were counted. Thus contradic- 
tions may arise concerning the term of office of a ruler 
who, like Louis XIV, ascended the throne as a minor, 
because in one statement the years of regency are counted 
to his term of office, in another not ; or where a city was 
twice destroyed, and in one case one destruction, in an- 
other the other, is referred to'; or where a city was de- 
stroyed, and then was built again under the same name ; or 
where a city was destroyed, and built again under a differ- 
ent name ; or where two kings ruled the same country con- 
temporaneously (thus in the case of Belshazzar, who con- 
sequently promised Daniel, that he should be the third 
ruler in the kingdom, not the second). Or a city or a 
person may have two names, like Joseph, who was also 
called Zaphnath Paaneah, or like Daniel, who was also 
called Belteshazzar ; or like Voltaire, whose name was 
changed in later years, formerly having been D'Arouet; 
or like Melanchthon, whose works were at one time pub- 
lished in Italy as those of Terranigra. Then why could 
the father-in-law of Moses not have had two names in 
different languages, one of which perhaps was his title, 



19S THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

priest or high priest? (Ex. ii, 16.) Thus it is possible 
that, in speaking of an embassy, one may refer to the 
leading man or spokesman, while another may refer also 
to his attendant or attendants; that one should speak of 
"him," another of ''them." And so on! Such and 
many other examples of contradictions, which the think- 
ing man can easily solve, make him hesitate in passing 
judgment. And I am convinced that the apparently con- 
tradictory reports of the evangelists concerning the resur- 
rection of Christ Avould be in full harmony if all the de- 
tails of the complicated event were known; and I have 
seen reports more contradictory than these, which, upon 
examination of the facts, proved thoroughly true. Thus 
only one of the two blind men near Jericho can have 
spoken; but likely these are two similar events, like the 
multiplying of bread and fish, to which Jesus explicitly 
refers, as having been two distinct events. Undoubtedly 
Jesus healed hundreds of blind, of whom there were and 
are yet so many in Palestine; "He healed them all." How 
often He may have been petitioned by them in the words, 
"Son of David, have mercy on me!" Indeed, repetition 
is an essential trait of His works and words, too often 
ignored. He was obliged to proclaim the same divine 
ideas at one time to the apostles and disciples, at another 
time to the multitude, and He did it in almost the same 
words. It was no more necessary for Him to cast about 
for new forms of expression than for new deeds. How 
easily He could have astonished the multitude by ever- 
changing miracles; but, as He had the messengers re- 
port to John, He always performed the same : "The blind 
see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, 
the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached." 



OBJECTIONS. 199 

(Luke vii, 22.) And yet in each case the deed was in- 
dividual. 

Questions, too, like those concerning ruminating hares 
and oviparous hedgehogs have been answered diversely. 
Professor Ruetimeyer, of Basel, one of the foremost au- 
thorities on ruminants in Europe, wrote concerning this 
question: ''That the hare ruminates is not new to me. 
But I call attention to the fact that in present-day ana- 
tomical and embryological classification the habit of rumi- 
nating alone is not a valid basis for classification ; other- 
wise ruminating fishes would also have to be taken in." 
Concerning the oviparous hedgehog it has been reported 
that Director Hancke, of the Zoological Museum in Ade- 
laide (Southern Australia), and at the same time the 
Englishman Caldwell in Northern Australia, without 
having mutual knowledge of each other, had found ovip- 
arous hedgehogs (the ^gg 15mm. long and 13mm. wide). 
Others say the Hebrew word kippos does not signify 
hedgehog, but a kind of serpent (arrow-snake). I do 
not know, neither do I care, which explanation is the cor- 
rect one. 

In short, so many things in history and science, which 
were ridiculed for many years, have proved true and sim- 
ple, that a Christian may quietly let such matters rest. 
But what about the many variants, of which there has 
been so much ado since Tischendorf ? Of the Old Testa- 
ment, Professor Kautzsch, one of the foremost Old Tes- 
tament scholars, says, "Almost total absence of variants." 
Attacked from all sides for thousands of years, this word 
stands unaltered, like a granite rock, amid the surging 
waves. And of the variants of the New Testament there 
is not one that proclaims another doctrine, or contradicts 



200 THB BIBLE THB WORD OP GOD, 

the remainder of the Scriptures. If, e. g., in the textus 
receptus we read, "Jesus distributed the loaves to the dis- 
ciples, and the disciples to them that were set down," in- 
stead of "Jesus distributed the loaves to them that were 
set down" (John vi, ii) ; or, "Thy sins be forgiven thee," 
instead of "Thy sins be forgiven" (Matt, ix, 2, 5), any 
one can see that the sense is wholly the same. Equally 
justified are "the holy angels" and "the angels ;" "of my 
Father" and "of the Father," "of the Lord Christ" and 
"of the Lord Jesus Christ," etc. And we shall certainly 
not lose confidence in the Word, because we read "a great 
multitude" instead of "a multitude;" "Jesus said," in- 
stead of "He said;" or "He came," 'instead of "Jesus 
came;" or because frequently "and" or "also" or "even" 
is found in one version, and not in another. What a con- 
tradiction it is that those who deny inspiration, and 
teach that one should not cling to words, are just the ones 
who contend most about words, and frequently about 
words only. 

It belongs to the dispensations of Divine Providence 
relative to the Bible that God has isolated it, and fenced 
it off, as it were. We know Greek and Roman literature, 
know also a good part of Egyptian literature, and shall 
soon have entire libraries of deciphered cuneiform writ- 
ings. As Hebrew literature we have only the Bible, not 
a single original work in this language dating from the 
time of Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David ; neither a gram- 
mar, but only a few Jewish commentaries on the Bible, 
e. g., the Talmud, the Sohar, and others. This is not 
fortuitous, the divine intention is clear. The Scriptures 
are to stand unalloyed and unparalleled, are not to be 
supported by any other authority, and are to be self-ex- 
pository. 



OBJECTIONS. 20 1 

It is certainly not the fault of the Bible that it reports 
so much that is immoral ! Why are we so bad ? If the 
human race had remained pure from the beginning, its 
history would also be pure. The Bible knows neither 
consideration nor indulgence, but only truth. And that 
the open enunciation of this truth is repulsive to us, ought 
to make us ashamed; for it proves how little we are in 
the truth, and how little we can bear the truth. We are 
a poor, proud, hypocritical, virtue-dissembling generation, 
which is ever trying to cover its nakedness and leprosy 
with beautiful rags ; is ever adorning and painting itself, 
in order to play its part on the stage of life and in society, 
and whose members are ever complimenting one another 
on their beautiful, flourishing, and healthy appearance. 
Our incessant endeavor is toward appearing better than 
we are, toward making as favorable an impression as pos- 
sible on others, and toward avoiding at all events to let 
others see the filthy dregs of our hearts. There is no 
person, the history of whose life and soul is not immoral, 
and this true history will some day come to light. "We 
must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ." Of 
our revelation before the judgment seat of Christ the 
Bible gives us a prelude, and says sternly and coldly. 
Such are you, even the best among you. 

The Bible knows no fear of men, and does not inter- 
rogate our pleasure or displeasure, nor our view-point. 
It establishes its view-point as firm as a rock, and who- 
ever rushes up against this rock, crushes his skull. The 
Bible does not occupy itself with Christian literature; 
does not purpose to be a book on religion for the edu- 
cated ; knows nothing of ethics or aesthetics, and does not 
write moral stories. In it, poor Lazarus does not finally 



202 THE BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

marry a wealthy relative, nor is the rich man bankrupted 
and eventually converted; at the death of Paul, Peter, 
John, it does not write a necrology ad major em gloriam 
of the deceased faithful servant of Christ, and does not 
make as much ado about the death of the pious as we do. 
It is not concerned about the good reputation of its 
heroes; they are cowards and liars, perjurers, adulterers, 
and murderers, sinners all, for it knows only the honor 
of God, not the honor of men, and knows of only one sin- 
less person. In its power and freedom it moves calmly 
on, knows neither system nor method, neither pious nor 
impious fabrication and tendency, neither the scholarly 
nor the edifying nor the pulpit style; it dashes to pieces 
good and evil prejudices, it sets down primitive granite 
mountains, and does not devote much time to scenic gar- 
dening and decorative floral culture. 

"But the horrible shedding of blood in the Bible!" 
others exclaim ; "I can not believe that a kind God com- 
manded such a thing." Here, too, we ask: Whose fault 
is it ? Who first shed blood ? Certainly not God in Para- 
dise. Who slew his brother? What heroic deeds do the 
"Iliad" and the "Niebelungenlied" celebrate? Murder, 
and again murder. Of what is the history of the nations 
full ? Of what do they boast ? Of great battles, in which 
they murdered men, their brothers, by tens of thousands. 
The earth drops human blood. Now a just God says: 
As ye have done, so shall it be done unto you ; as ye shed 
blood, so will I shed your blood. "And I heard the angel 
of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, because 
Thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood 
of saints and prophets, and Thou hast given them blood 
to drink, for they are worthy." It is characteristic of 



OBJECTIONS, 203 

the pale Christianity of many present-day weakhngs that 
they are no longer able to recognize and to bear the deal- 
ings of a just God in the history of the world and in the 
Bible, and speak of a stern Jehovah as opposed to Jesus, 
who preached only love. They not only do not know that 
the God who commanded Joshua to exterminate the Ca- 
naanites with their wives and children, because of atroci- 
ties they had committed for centuries, is the same God 
who, having become man, took little children up in His 
arms and blessed them, and that the Jehovah in whose 
spirit and power Elijah killed four hundred atrocious 
murderers of souls, who, according to the law of Moses, 
had merited death tenfold, is the Christ who said, "Love 
your enemies;" but they do not even perceive that Christ 
judges more severely and terribly than Jehovah. He does 
not punish with the death of the body, but with the eter- 
nal damnation of Gehenna, with the fire that is not 
quenched and the worm that does not die. Compared 
with this, what are all the temporal punishments of the 
old covenant? With His "Ye have heard, . . . 
but I say unto you," He threatens with hell-fire 
him who says to his brother, "Thou fool!" Caper- 
naum and Bethsaida He casts into a deeper hell than 
Sodom and Gomorrah, which He had destroyed from the 
face of the earth with fire and brimstone. When Jerusa- 
lem was taken, He, who had wept for the city, visited 
upon hundreds of thousands — to Him is given all power 
in heaven and on earth — the word, "His blood be on us 
and our children ;" and He also let Nineveh and Babylon, 
Carthage and Rome, perish in blood on account of their 
sins. He, the "meek and lowly of heart," will some day 
"tread the wine-press of the wrath of God," and "in flam- 



204 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

ing fire take vengeance on them that know not God ;" and 
in the face of the terrors of this destruction of the world, 
even the most horrifying events of the world's history 
will grow pale. But to the angels the Son of God, who 
in the agonies of death and with His sweat as great drops 
of blood falling to the ground pleads, "Father! if it be 
possible" . . . and it is not possible, ... is 
the most terrible revelation of divine justice. Whoever 
has so little of the Spirit of God that he does not under- 
stand this holy and righteous wrath, may forbear speak- 
ing to us about His love. He does not understand God's 
love, for it rests upon the rock of His righteousness. 
Would this God not gladly have spared His own Son ? 

And just those who in our day object to the Bible on 
the ground that it is full of childish tales, say the Bible 
is too difficult to be understood by children. For this 
reason there is a strong agitation among teachers, espe- 
cially in Northern Germany, against the memorizing of 
passages of Scripture that are not understood. If one 
hears the objections of these men, and their very meager 
conception of Bible history, Christianity, and religion in 
general, the impression is indeed received, that they 
themselves do not understand the Scriptures, and that it 
would be better for the child to receive no religious in- 
struction at all than that imparted by such men. It is 
proof of some knowledge of self that they reluctantly im- 
part instruction for which they are so ill fitted. Roscher 
is right : ''The schoolmen who want to limit the memo- 
rizing of passages of Scripture so much in our schools, 
must never have experienced what unspeakable and inex- 
haustible refreshment such treasures of memory can af- 
ford in sorrowful night-watches." 



OBJECTIONS. 205 

And when in many school organs one reads their effu- 
sions about ''the poisonous fangs of evangehcal ortho- 
doxy that must be extracted," their "nocturnal demon- 
ism," "mediaeval darkness and spiritual servitude," it 
seems as though the pending conflict between Christianity 
and modern heathendom will be opened in the domain of 
the schools, and that persecution will begin by compell- 
ing believers, for the sake of "uniform education," to send 
their children to non-confessional schools, Vv^hich will soon 
be godless schools. And here, as also in France, there 
are persons voicing the opinion that the modern State 
can no longer suffer its future citizens to be educated in 
the old superstition ; that it is justified in giving them— 
in forcing upon them, if necessary — enlightened in- 
struction. 

Besides the inability of the teacher, the family and 
its entire irreligious, stupid, soul-deadening atmosphere 
are the cause of the child's lack of understanding of Bible 
history, — a lack that ofttimes really obtains, but for the 
most part is only asserted. The Bible, too, teaches an 
inherited debit. Just as even little children of successive 
generations of pious people often manifest a surprising 
susceptibility for, and a touching understanding of, Bible 
truths, corroborating the word, "Out of the mouth of 
babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise," so the 
descendants of parents steeped in rank materialism mani- 
fest the exact opposite. Here souls of children may be 
found which, being covered with a thick crust of clay, 
manifest only the lower instincts, and seem calloused 
against that which is lofty and true. 

Moreover the argument in our day, so often directed 
against Biblical instruction and the memorizing of Scrip- 



2o6 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

ture passages, viz., that a child must be given only what 
it can understand — is one of the sayings of modern peda- 
gogy that sound reasonable, but in truth are fundamen- 
tally wrong. Even the medium teacher, educator, and 
father, who believes that he must explain minutely what- 
ever he tells or shows the child, thereby trains tedious 
products of reason after his own likeness that move in 
commonplace matters, and yet are pedantically conceited. 
According to the above principle a mother ought not 
to speak or sing to her child or converse with it at all 
during the firsts year, for it does not understand her. 
(How much intimate and gladdening chatting, stammer- 
ing, babbling, how many confessions of soul and declara- 
tions of love would be lost to the mother and to the 
child!) But God — or instead of this word, foreign to 
the pedagogues of to-day, let us say Nature — proceeds in 
a manner exactly opposite to this. It casts the child to be 
trained into a world which at first it can not understand, 
and without even giving it the means {e. g., language) 
for understanding and learning. And despite this great 
mass of utterly new facts and impressions, which seem 
impossible for it to master, in this sea of unknown phe- 
nomena, among this multitude of strange organisms and 
beings, the little newcomer grows and prospers in body 
and soul, learns to think without being instructed, ob- 
serves and compares, learns to speak without lexicon or 
grammar, learns astonishingly much without teacher or 
text-book during the first three years of its life, perhaps 
more than in all subsequent years. For from the moment 
of its creation the human soul is a power of God that is 
able to grasp and apprehend this world, because it is 
greater and less temporal than this world. Even in the 



OBJECTIONS. 207 

smallest child this personality of divine descent effects the 
astonishingly rapid and harmonious development of body 
and soul. Here already there is a mighty power of as- 
similation constantly active, which does not first under- 
stand and then appropriate, but which immediately sees 
and eats and drinks, and grows large and strong there- 
from. This child-soul is not a reservoir to be filled — this 
is only the head — but a bud, which has in it all the life, 
all the forces and essences of the full blossom, yea, of 
the fruit. 

Of this modern pedagogues understand less and less; 
they want to train the child, and get farther and farther 
away from it ; are more and more wrapped up in abstract 
ideas, in dry hazy theories, and dry up and wither spirit- 
ually. How do you expect to influence the child, your- 
selves having nothing of the childlike left in you? To 
you the word applies, ^'Except ye be converted and be- 
come as little children, ye shall not enter into the king- 
dom of heaven," neither shall you arrive at a correct 
pedagogy on earth. 

And the demand, objectionable alike from pedagog- 
ical and from religious standpoint, that children should 
be acquainted even in the schools with "the certain 
results of Biblical criticism," feignedly for the purpose 
of furnishing them weapons for the conflict, can be made 
only by men who do not know and do not believe that 
God, according to His promise, puts His praise into the 
mouths of children, and that His Spirit can enable these 
little ones, and often has enabled them, to lay low with 
a smooth flint from the brook the Goliaths of unbelief 
in the heavy armor of science. Those among them, to 
whom God does not give His Spirit for this purpose, will 



2o8 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

not be aided either by Saul's armor; and may God pro- 
tect us from the defense of the Bible on the part of crit- 
ically trained high-school and college pupils ! 

But the Bible contains so many contradictions ! Yes, 
it does contain much that is hard to comprehend ; reports, 
that leave us in the dark ; enigmatical, seemingly unneces- 
sary statements ; incomprehensible commands, the ground 
and purpose of which can not be seen ; inexplicable deeds, 
even of pious persons; words at which one shudders; 
stones of stumbling in the middle of the road; fences, 
that bar the path. And, withal, no explanation or elucida- 
tion, neither reference to nor consideration of any other 
enunciations, or anything related in a different way! 
This is true of the evangelists, who knew one another 
(John knew Matthew) ; each pursues his own course, 
utterly unconcerned as to whether his words agree with 
those of the other, or not; this, too, is not human. In- 
deed, God has not made faith in His Word easy for us — 
it would not be His way — and those mistake who con- 
sider Christians to be a credulous multitude who, with- 
out distinction or reflection or examination, accept and 
believe all that is written in a venerable old pious book. 
No ; like the trees of the forests by storms, so are we oft- 
times swayed hither and thither by mighty winds; we, 
too, know doubtings, and the anxious, earnest, regardless 
striving for truth at the cost of most precious personal 
opinions, of which our opponents boast so much. How, 
throughout the Word, election and eternal decree surge 
and wrestle with man's self-determination, and the great 
question of fate with that of freedom! But have the 
wisest of men solved it even in the course of six thousand 
years? Just because God has let such questions stand. 



OBJECTIONS. 209 

and no man is able to answer them, we, too, let them 
stand; for we know that some day a higher, heavenly 
analysis will solve problems that can not be approached 
by earthly arithmetic. "Work out your own salvation 
with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in 
you both to will and to do of His good pleasure;" this, 
said a student to me, is the most absurd contradiction 
thinkable. But the Christian who daily experiences and 
passes through both, needs no explanation, and hears 
God laughing (Psa. ii) at those who think themselves 
wise; those at whose feet He has, with sovereign irony, 
cast such diamonds in the rough, in order that on them 
they might break off their wisdom teeth. Why did God 
not give us a Word reasonable and intelligible from A 
to Z, systematically and methodologically arranged, with 
thorough demonstration ; why not a reasonable catechism 
and text-book on religion? Because He wants to drill 
us in faith, because he mocks at the wisdom of the wise, 
because he wants to show us that His wisdom is not 
needed to confound our wisdom, for His foolishness 
suffices for this ; because it was His good pleasure to hide 
such things from the wise and prudent; and because of 
this His Son, who looks deep into the eternal decrees of 
eternal wisdom, rejoices in spirit and thanks the Father. 
(Luke x, 21.) But, of course, man can not overcome 
this. Who wants to confess to God and to men that he 
is a poor fool, blind and ignorant, unable of himself to 
grasp the heavenly and the eternal ! That would be a 
mockery of all progress, all science and enlightenment, 
yea, of reason, which, some say, with pious mien, is also 
a gift of God. There are two kinds of men, and two 
Bibles, A natural Bible, an ordinary little book that 
14 



2IO THU BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

looks like other books, and contains a variety of matter, 
related by different persons at different times, a mixture 
of historic and religious matter, things intelligible, and 
things incredible. The natural man knows only this 
natural Bible. There is another, a spiritual Bible, which 
is inclosed in the natural Bible as the kernel is inclosed 
in the shell; a fruit, juicy and nourishing, a Word full of 
divine and eternal ideas ; this Bible only the spiritual man 
knows. Augustine was right: the dark places in the 
Bible come from the dark places in our hearts. 

The Word of God had to appear in the form of a 
servant, even as Christ did, say many, and thereby want 
to cover up the faults they think they find in it. Yes, this 
Word scorns all pomp and all art of speech, despises win- 
ning introductions, ingenious arrangement, clever notions, 
stirring pathos, captivating oratory (true oratory, Pascal 
has well said, scorns oratory), and carelessly casts great 
words of life, germs of eternity, upon the street, upon 
the rock, among the thorns, and upon good soil. To us 
refined and overrefined modernerSj who are ever run- 
ning after new, catchy, sensational words, and who in 
art and speech attach greater importance to the form 
than to the content, this Word and its garb may indeed 
seem very uncomely, rude, rough, simple, and poor. But 
just as Christ, who was derided by the highly educated 
Pharisees on account of His words and His appearance, 
remained without sin, even in the form of a servant, there 
being "no deceit found in his mouth," even so the divine 
Word. 

Finally, if many say, "Of the Bible I consider only 
those parts to be the Word of God from which I receive 
something, which give me something," they really mean 



OBJECTIONS. - 211 

this: Of the Bible I take that to be God's Word which 
is agreeable to me, which is in keeping with my reason, 
my views, and my inclinations, which does not contra- 
dict my enlightenment, my knowledge, my prejudices, 
which does not pain me. But whatever undoes my wis- 
dom and my reason, whatever humiliates me, whatever 
crushes and condemns my hard, proud heart, and anni- 
hilates me, the sinner, in the presence of Divine Majesty, 
in order to offer me salvation through the merits of 
Christ alone; the entire doctrine of repentance, conver- 
sion, and the new birth, — all this I do not accept; this 
to me is not the Word of God. 

Having now considered a few of the objections of 
candid persons who would gladly believe, we can pass 
by the numerous objections constantly raised and repeated 
by despisers and scoffers from olden times down to Vol- 
taire and his present-day disciples. Even Hercules would 
not be able to clean this Augean stable with its three 
thousand oxen, and we believers are not able to rid the 
world of unbelief. For many do not want to believe, 
but remain doubters. They are more at ease as such, 
for unbelief lays no duties upon them. A lady, e. g., 
who through the writings of modern philosophers had 
lost faith in the Bible, sent me a list of objections to the 
Bible, and after I had conscientiously refuted them to 
the best of my knowledge, she sent me a second list with 
the assurance that she would believe, if I refuted these 
also. I answered: "You are suffering with skepticism, 
that constant symptom of spiritual ansemia and chlorosis 
with which certain persons, who will have to answer for 
it, have inoculated you; and if I refuted your new ob- 
jections, the spirit of doubt would suggest a hundred 



212 THB BIBLE THB WORD OP GOD, 

others to you ; and if I could refute these also, he would 
trump, and whisper to you, 'What, God's Word ! Why, 
how do you know that there is a God at all ?' Pray God 
that He might heal you ; I am not able to do so." 

Alas ! Why do we find it so hard to believe in God ? 
Why do we distrust Him so much? On earth a child 
believes its father, a wife her husband, a friend his friend 
wholly ; it is a matter of honor and pride to them to be- 
lieve in such persons! Should God, whose kindness ex- 
tends to all creation, not have sent us a single word of 
love, of truth, of mercy concerning all our anxious ques- 
tions? Should He who, like a father, feeds and pre- 
serves our bodies, not be at all concerned in our souls? 
And when we open His Bible, and find there that He 
most positively asseverates, yea, swears by Himself, that 
He had for a short time forsaken us in His wrath, but 
that in eternal mercy He will turn unto us, that He will 
wipe all tears from our eyes, and will be our God eter- 
nally, the evil heart, in the presence of such promises, the 
glory of which was never conceived of b}^ human heart, 
must doubt, interpret, carp, find fault, and grumble ! Why 
can we not determine once for all to cast from us faint- 
heartedness and discouragement and the whole trash of 
enlightenment, unbelief, and criticism, and full of re- 
joicing to cry out to this God : "Yea, Father, I believe 
Thee! I will believe Thee! I will trust in Thy Word !" 
We shall err as long as we are on earth; but why not 
rather err on God's side than on that of men? Is it so 
dangerous, do we risk so much, even though we believe 
this Father a little too much, trust Him a little too much 
instead of ourselves, build firmly upon Him instead of 
upon this corruptible world — we who daily follow men 



OBJECTIONS. 213 

blindly, and swear by their word, as if we had never ex- 
perienced how^ the word of men deceives and is broken? 

As the W'hole cross is more easily borne than the half 
of it, so full faith in the Bible is easier than faith inter- 
mingled with doubt; in the latter you will never find 
rest for your soul. 

The many doubts, discussions, and investigations con- 
cerning faith in the Bible are like the spirit of care, and 
both are an offense against the Almighty Heavenly Father. 
Whoever has to do with the spirit of care, and hopes to 
be able to conquer it with calculations and logical rea- 
sons, will not get through with it. New ifs and buts 
constantly present themselves to the anxious mind, and 
back of every care there is a new and greater one, for 
our possessions and our existence are too insecure and ex- 
posed to too many possibilities and dangers, and finally 
the distracted soul despairs. Thus I once heard that an 
unmarried old farmer of my neighborhood had hung him- 
self in his barn because he had only sixty thousand marks 
left, and perceived that he must eventually go to the hos- 
pital. With glad courage and w-ith constant help from 
above, God w411 honor the faith of him w^ho, once for all, 
bids adieu to this spirit of care, and determines no longer 
to care for the morrow, but to trust in the God w^ho feeds 
the birds and clothes the lilies. Thus I found a widow in 
a poor congregation among the mountains. She had 
seven children, the oldest of whom was still in school, 
and was so poor that when I gave her thirty pfennig for 
service rendered, she was deeply moved, and exclaimed 
gratefully, "I do not earn so much money in a w^hole 
day !" Now her children are all grown, well, industrious, 
and useful. God helped ; how, I do not know, and it is a 



214 THB BIBLE THE WORD Of GOD. 

secondary matter, too. He has ways enough, where we 
see none. 

Thus it is with faith in the Bible. If you want to 
investigate thoroughly, examine into the various opin- 
ions of men, and conquer your doubts one by one with 
demonstrations, before you believe, you will never get 
through. Constantly this man or that man, a periodical 
or a new book, will bring up new exceptions and objec- 
tions, and gradually even the little faith you had will be 
lost. In this way you will never arrive at a true faith. 
Choose the shorter way. Cast from you your beggarly 
wisdom and that of all men; cast yourself at God's feet, 
and ask Him for enlightenment through His Spirit; He 
will not gainsay you, for it is His will that we believe in 
Him and His Word; then, with glad, firm faith, you 
can calmly watch the strife and conflict of opinions and 
views. Let the waters roar and the waves beat ; you are 
standing on the Rock of Eternity. 



IV. 

BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 

' ' Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind, 

In duerren Blaettem saeuselt der Wind." 

—GOETHE. 

Sad to say, it is hardly possible in our day to speak 
of the Bible without making mention of Biblical criti- 
cism. Like all else, it is not a new thing, and even in 
the Middle Ages rationalistic Rabbis showed an aston- 
ishing degree of modern wisdom in dealing with the Old 
Testament. But Biblical criticism was probably never 
before carried on as generally and as radically as in the 
present day. 

We must here distinguish between Biblical criticism 
and Biblical investigation. Biblical investigation, Bible 
study, the Christian is not only permitted, but commanded 
to pursue. ''Search the Scriptures, for they are they 
which testify of Me," Christ says. Biblical research has 
produced many excellent works, such as Calvin's "Insti- 
tutes," Arnd's "Wahres Christentum/' Bengel's ''Gno- 
mon/' Culmann's "Bthik/' and others. Instead of the 
verbally inspired original we now have translations. Any 
one who knows anything of language and languages real- 
izes that a translation, as such, means a weakening of 
the text, and a loss of depth and manysidedness. There 
is never perfect congruity between any two languages; 
and although there is (apparently) congruity between 

215 



2i6 THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD. 

words like house, tree, mountain, yet the higher the word 
and idea, the greater the difference; e. g., in Seele, Geist, 
esprit, spirit, Gemuet. If it is true that every higher 
word of man — e. g., that of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare 
— in reaHty can not be translated, how much less the 
divine Word ! Here it is the task of the believer always to 
look for the translation that most nearly preserves the 
sense of the original. It will often be impossible to give 
the exact sense of the original, and in many cases it will 
even remain an open question which is the best transla- 
tion. But such a study is not criticism. Such Biblical 
research says, I believe, therefore I investigate. Biblical 
criticism says, I investigate, in order to see whether 
eventually I shall want to believe. It is this Biblical 
criticism of which we here speak. 

Is not theology, as the science that treats of God, a 
lofty science, and worthy of respect? Certainly! Cal- 
vin was right: "Theology is the queen of sciences, and 
all other sciences are its handmaids." And, besides the 
men of Scripture, the greatest men of the Church are 
theologians, e. g., Calvin, Knox, Luther, Melanchthon, 
and others. True theology, founded upon the Word of 
God, is highest science. The venerable Bishop Amos 
Comenius said at the close of his fruitful life work : "If 
I am asked as to my theology, I take the Bible, and say 
with all my soul, I believe everything that is written in 
this Book!" From what other source shall a man take 
his theology? If not from the Bible it will soon be true, 
corruptio optimi pessima. 

It goes without saying, that we can not here consider 
minutely the almost innumerable works of this criticism 
■ — it is said that about eight hundred new works appear 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 217 

annually in Europe and America — if for no other reason 
than that it changes to all shadings of color, and reveals 
all steps and stages, from shy moderated criticism to the 
boldest destructive criticism. It would sooner be possible 
to compile from these a copious anthology of contradic- 
tory views and h3^potheses. But all shadings and factions 
have one common basis. ''Freedom of investigation!" 
is the battle-cry of criticism, as well as of modern science 
in general. We want to look at things as they are, say 
these men, and search them out thoroughly, without being 
influenced by notions handed down from past ages, with- 
out being misled by faith in authorities, and without being 
hampered by anything that hinders free thought, and 
befogs open vision; then we know, and need no longer 
believe. This they call the unbiasedness of science. To 
the multitude this is imposing, and seems great and beau- 
tiful. But this unbiasedness is self-deception, and an 
impossibility. 

Freedom of investigation would, above all else, re- 
quire that man himself be free. But he is not free. And 
it is the priests of free investigation who repeat ad 
nauseam that prophets and apostles were children and 
products of their age, that they were shut up in the then 
doctrines and views, and had voiced the same. No. The 
Truth, the Son of God, the Light that came into the 
world, had, in distinction from other men, freed them 
from their age and the spirit of their age; and just this 
is great in their word and their doctrine that they look 
away from the relative, the temporal, and that which 
belonged to their age, posit absolute and eternal things, 
and are silent as to their descent, their family, their rela- 
tion to their relatives, to the temple and the State, and 



2i8 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

to the culture and civilization of their age. Read the first 
Gospel. What does Matthew write concerning himself? 
One verse (ix, 9), and not a word more. How a man 
who had been permitted to associate personally with the 
Son of God for three years would have told us w^hat he 
had asked the Lord, and what the Lord had answered 
him; what he had felt, thought, perceived, and believed 
at the time of his call, how much derision and opposition 
he had endured; and at the close of his book he would 
have reported, even though briefly, how he had fared later 
on ! Not a syllable about all this. And in the face of all 
this unselfishness we are asked to believe that these men 
had been entirely shut up in their relations and circum- 
stances, and had intentionally composed, arranged, and 
had misrepresented for a purpose! Well, they at least 
did not seek honor for themselves. If they and Christ 
had been children of their age, and had represented the 
views of their age, they would not have been persecuted, 
and Christ would not have been crucified; for every age 
loves its children. Thus our age loves and reverences 
these modern investigators, and they in turn do not tire 
of boasting how our age, the modern age, the twentieth 
century, the age of light and enlightenment, how recent 
science and investigation had brought us free and true 
knowledge. What is this but confessing to be a child of 
one's age and its views, and entering the service of this 
age? But how shall we harmonize this with the fact that 
at the same time they boast of being the unbiased ones ? 

He who has not been liberated by God is ever a child 
and servant of his age, is a co-sufferer in its spiritual 
tendencies, its spiritual atmosphere, its particular narrow- 
ness, and its peculiar errors, and is constantly being in- 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 219 

fluenced, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or in- 
voluntarily, by his career and his station in life, by family 
and profession, possessions or poverty, health or in- 
validity. 

But the great, all-conditioning presupposition which 
controls every one, even though he be unconscious of it, 
which saturates him as water saturates a sponge, and of 
which he can no more rid himself than he can jump out 
of his skin, is he himself, his personality, his ego, the 
formula of his soul^ which makes him just what he is, 
and nothing else. Thus to the melancholic the world ap- 
pears in a peculiar light. His world, his knowledge of 
the world, or in the last instance his view of the world, 
is different from that of the sanguine or the phlegmatic 
person. 

Even unbelief must admit that, as we saw in the first 
chapter, the criterion by which the subject measures the 
object is, and can be, only its own ego, and that all 
thoughts rest upon the law of identity : "A=A," or bet- 
ter: "I am I." From this presupposition all knowledge 
proceeds, and it will always be individual. Even in the 
small child this dissimilarity expresses itself in the man- 
ner in which in eating and drinking it appropriates to it- 
self the material world. It "likes this," and "does not 
like that." It does not occur to any one to inquire after 
the reason. Personal taste is the inalienable royal pre- 
rogative of individuality, both in things of the body and 
in things of the spirit. "Do you like music ?" "Are you 
interested in painting, or do you prefer sculpture?" These 
are facts generally known, but not generally considered. 
This shows that every one brings presuppositions along 
into the world which have their roots in the formula of 



220 THB BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

his soul, which formula he does not know, and which 
makes him the person he is. 

These presuppositions exert upon the sum total of his 
knowledge an influence that he can not evade^ since it 
belongs to the great "unconscious" in him; and if he 
could be examined with spiritual Roentgen rays, one 
would know in advance what to himself is yet hidden, 
viz., what his position will be toward any question what- 
soever. Thus in Professor Marshall's interesting book, 
"The Deep Sea and Its Life," I happen upon the passage: 
"Though we are forced to the conclusion that those 
oldest and most primitive beings, which must be 
considered the common progenitors of the entire plant 
and animal world, must somewhere and at some time 
have originated spontaneously from inorganic matter, 
we can not well conceive of this event's having happened 
without light." This is called science "without pre- 
suppositions." 

How untenable the conception of the absence of pre- 
suppositions in science is, appeared when, in the case of 
Professor Spahn, this pet term was hurled into the world 
of German scholars by Professor Mommsen. Thereby 
Mommsen had pointed out that a Protestant is hindered 
by his presuppositions from appreciating correctly "the 
mighty spiritual work of papacy." This was displeas- 
ing to Professor Dr. Fricke, of Leipzig, who was also 
"free from presuppositions." While he agreed with 
Mommsen in theory, he declared papacy to be "the adul- 
terated religion of a derailed mechanical philosophy that 
is capable of all manner of abuse." Therefore freedom 
from presuppositions is synonymous neither with unity 
of spirit, nor with objectivity. For Mommsen and 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 221 

BVicke are both convinced of their objectivity. Who is 
right ? 

Thereupon Professor Mommsen, in a reply to Baron 
V. HertHng, essentially relinquished his first demand. 
As was to be expected, the great historian is sufficiently 
discerning to admit that "freedom from presuppositions 
in all scientific research is the ideal goal toward which 
every conscientious man strives, but which no one can 
reach. Every one originally brings with him religious, 
political, and social convictions, and shapes them accord- 
ing to the measure of his experiences in labor and in life." 
Indeed, he is sufficiently just to emphasize expressly, ''No 
true Catholic can be blamed for the fact that his view of 
the world, and consequently his research and teaching, is 
influenced by his faith." And finally he limits his demand 
to this, that "no Catholic can believe or teach anything 
that contradicts his reason." That sounds nice. But 
right here is the difficulty. Who shall determine what 
contradicts the reason of another ? Professor Mommsen, 
e. g.j and no doubt many of those who applaud him, con- 
sider miracles to be contrary to reason. But at all times 
men like Socrates and Solomon, philosophers like Augus- 
tine, Pascal, and Leibnitz, naturalists like Newton and 
Linne, reformers like Luther and Calvin — men to whom 
reason can not summarily be denied — have harmonized 
the possibility of miracles thoroughly with their reason. 
It is the fashion of our day, e. g., to consider the doctrine 
of the infallibility of the pope bald nonsense. Well, no 
one has ever claimed that the pope is infallible in worldly 
matters, and Bishop Keppler lately emphasized, publicly, 
that even the pope is a poor sinful man, in need of divine 
grace; but the assumption, which I myself do not hold, 



222 THU BIB LB THE WORD OP GOD. 

that in difficult questions of the faith God at all times 
grants the head of His Church on earth sufficient enlight- 
enment from above, that he will give the correct decision, 
I hold to be far less contrary to reason than the dogma 
of many naturalists of our day, that nothing had at one 
time come to be something — why, how, for what purpose, 
they do not know. 

The entire theory that science is free from presuppo- 
sitions rests upon the great, false presupposition that man 
can be without presuppositions. Only the Holy Ghost 
can make man free from his presuppositions. 

But granted that man were entirely free, that he came 
into the world without presuppositions, or could free him- 
self from presuppositions, there would still remain, before 
Biblical criticism would have to be recognized as justi- 
fied, the great question whether man, even though he be 
free and without presuppositions, is able to examine into 
divine revelation in order to determine its genuineness 
and truthfulness. Does he possess the necessary means 
and apparatus ? Do his undeistanding and reason suffice 
to examine and understand a Book that claims to be 
supernatural ? 

We have seen that human reason is a variable quan- 
tity, that it contradicts itself in different persons, that it 
can not master even the visible creation^ and that it ever 
vacillates between finiteness and infinity. But even if 
reason were in harmony with itself and could fully com- 
prehend the world surrounding us, the question would 
still arise whether it can give us any information con- 
cerning the invisible and eternal, concerning that which 
eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard. All deeply 
discerning, earnest thinkers have at all times answered: 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 223 

No ! This question is negated by the history of philoso- 
phy, this constant endeavor of man to find the eternal 
ground of the temporal by means of his reason. What 
assertions the worldly wise have made concerning God 
and the soul, immortality, spirit, and matter, time and 
space, and how they have alternately affirmed and denied 
all these things! How one here contradicts the other; 
how, ofttimes with bitter mockery, Plato charges Zeno, 
Kant charges lyocke, Schelling charges Spinoza, Schopen- 
hauer charges Hegel, with thinking wrongly, inconsist- 
ently, therefore unreasonably! But in regard to the 
main point the sagacious critic of pure reason says: 
"When I hear that a more than ordinary mind has dem- 
onstrated that there is no freedom of will, no hope of 
a future life, no God, I am fully assured, in advance, that 
he has done none of these ; not because I believed myself 
already to be in possession of undeniable proofs of these 
important tenets, but because transcendental criticism, 
which has disclosed to me the entire store of our pure 
reason, has fully convinced me that, being wholly insuffi- 
cient for affirmative assertions in this field, it will know 
as little, and even less, that will enable it to assert nega- 
tively concerning these questions." {Kritik der reinen 
Vernunft. Red. Ausgabe, S. 575.) And if reason can 
not tell us whether there is a God or not, how can it in- 
struct us concerning the attributes and deeds of this God, 
or how can it examine into a revelation of this God, in 
order to determine its divinity? Hence Kant also says 
that, for this reason, there can nowhere be a theology of 
reason. Fr. v. Meyer says, "God has created two lights : 
a great light. Revelation, to rule the day; and a lesser 
light, Reason, to rule the night." 



2 24 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

Here, too, the Bible transcends human wisdom. Un- 
mercifully it cuts into the flesh, and mocks at reason, 
when it would meddle with divine things. It ^'destroys 
logical conclusions," and demands '^captivity of every 
thought to the obedience of Christ." (2 Cor. x, 5.) It 
charges reason with a natural disposition to evil, and 
speaks of Christians who in times past "fulfilled the de- 
sires of the flesh and of the mind" (Eph. ii, 3), and 
frankly says, "You were sometime enemies in your mind 
by wicked works." (Col. i, 21.) It declares categoric- 
ally, "The natural man receiveth not the things of the 
Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him ; neither 
can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" 
(i Cor. ii, 14), and exclaims triumphantly, "Where is 
the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of 
this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this 
world?" (j Cor. i, 20.) 

Man created in the image of God could hear and un- 
derstand God and converse with Him. But man fallen 
away from God can not; his eyes have grown blind, his 
ears deaf, his spirit paralyzed concerning higher and 
loftier things. He has not only by nature become inca- 
pable of perceiving and understanding divine revelation, 
but the God of this world incessantly benights his mind, 
covers up and conceals from him the truth, and juggles 
him into falsehood and error by the delusion that he is a 
God, and can discern good and evil. And this is not 
enough. As a punishment for their deceit, God has hid- 
den the truth from "the wise and prudent of this world." 
(Matt, xi, 25.) What God conceals, man alone will 
never find. 

This, then, is clear Bible doctrine : Man, who is born 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 225 

in sin and lives in sin, who is under the influence of Satan, 
and from whom God has hidden the truth, can not un- 
derstand, tutor, and criticise the Bible. ''Your faith 
should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power 
of Godr 

Criticism says the opposite, and affirms the question 
raised above. It proceeds from the presupposition that 
human reason, human wisdom, luiman science, is able to 
perceive whether a revelation, if there be such at all, is 
divine, and what part of it is divine. Therefore the critic 
does not ask God to assist him in this matter; for that 
there is a God, and that He answers prayer, is to him a 
presupposition which he must first examine critically. 
Nor is he in need of the Holy Ghost in this matter; for 
he must first investigate whether there is a Holy Ghost, 
what He is able and not able to do. 

Thus two fundamental views, more radically opposed 
to each other than these two, could not be conceived of. 
The Bible negates Biblical criticism; Biblical criticism 
negates the Bible. 

Of course, this clear fact does not seem to be evident 
to the many in our day who prefer to remain on the 
boundary between good and evil^ truth and falsehood. 
These think that whoever studies the Bible by the aid of 
his reason must eventually be able to understand it, and 
to judge it correctly, without being obliged to believe in 
it. No. I once received instruction from a well-known 
mathematician and physicist. One day a coppersmith 
was hammering near the open window, and the noted pro- 
fessor asked me almost timidly : "Do you notice any dif- 
ference between this noise and the most beautiful music, 
as people call it? I am not able to do so." This man was 

15 



226 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

thoroughly versed in the theory of sound and sound 
waves, and could teach and demonstrate it; but he was 
utterly unable to appreciate the higher realm of melody 
and harmony resulting therefrom; Bach and Handel, 
Mozart and Beethoven passed by him without leaving 
trace or effect. Thus the servant of Elisha had reason 
to believe that he had good eyes and acute vision, and yet 
he was blind concerning the higher world. He did not 
see the heavenly body-guard surrounding the prophet 
until God opened his eyes. Therefore David prays, 
''Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous 
things out of Thy law." And concerning the disciples 
it is said, "Then opened He their understanding, that 
they might understand the Scriptures." Without this 
opening they could not understand them. Thus the 
scribes held the Scriptures in high esteem, were well 
versed in them, had more "authorities" than we, studied 
them day and night, read and wrote many commentaries, 
taught the Scriptures daily, and . . . understood noth- 
ing concerning them. When the Son of God came into 
the world, in order most clearly to fulfill these entire 
Scriptures, they crucified Him as a heretic and blas- 
phemer. The Bible, like Christ, knows only two classes 
of people, — the blind who perceive their blindness, and 
whose sin and blindness are taken away; and the blind 
who say, "We see," and whose sin remaineth. (John 
ix, 41.) 

The Bible either is what it claims to be: a Word of 
God to men,— "And God said !" "Thus saith the Lord : 
I have put my words in thy mouth !" — or it is not. But 
if not, then it is a fabrication of arrogant, ambitious, and 
mendacious men. Assail it, ye critics ; show forth clearly 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 227 

the deception, and receive thanks ! But if it is revelation, 
then, hands off the sanctuary, and cease criticising it and 
grumbhng about it! A divine revelation that is full of 
mistakes, unreliable, and useless, unless it is first revised 
and corrected by men, is an absurdity. 

Lessing, who was disposed to criticise, recognized this, 
and writes: "If there can be and must be a revelation, 
its containing things that transcend reason must be a rea- 
sonable proof of its truth, rather than an objection to it. 
Whoever polishes such revelation out of his religion, 
might as well have none at all ; for what is a revelation 
that reveals nothing? A certain captivity of reason to 
the obedience of faith rests on the essential idea of reve- 
lation; or, rather, reason voluntarily surrenders, its sub- 
mission is nothing but a confession of its limits, whenever 
it is assured of the reality of revelation." 

And Luther wrote to Spalatin, who asked him con- 
cerning the best method of studying the Bible: "Above 
all things it is quite certain {prinmm id certissimum est) 
that one can not search into the Holy Scriptures by means 
of study, nor by means of the intellect (ingenium). 
Therefore begin with prayer, that the Lord grant unto 
you the true understanding of His Word. There is no 
interpreter of the Word of God, except the Author of 
the Word, God Himself." (L. Ep. I, p. 88.) In an- 
other place he says, "Scripture without any commentary 
is the sun from which all Doctors receive light." 

To many theologians and non-theologians the matter 
does not seem so simple, and it is true that the question, 
whether the Bible is a revelation or not, involves other 
deep, serious, and difficult questions, e. g., that of inspira- 
tion. Luther says : "Before a man learns to understand 



228 THB BIB LB THU WORD OF GOD. 

the first words of Moses, *In the beginning God created 
the heaven and the earth/ he is dead ; and though he Hved 
a thousand years, he would not fully learn to understand 
them." So here, too. All objections to revelation and 
inspiration do not refute them, and all proofs do not prove 
them. Such truths lie beyond the possibilities of demon- 
stration, and must be experienced through much spiritual 
labor and prayer, vintil a lively consciousness of their 
truth arises and is developed more and more in the depths 
of the soul, — a consciousness which the believer often is 
not able to express in words. Just as the grain of wheat 
must perish before it is transformed into a new plant, 
just as all natural virtues of man must die in order to rise 
again as divine virtues, so, especially in young Christians, 
the handed-down inherited faith in the Bible must perish, 
to rise again, a new and lively faith. But great, deeply- 
rooted truths irresistibly urge to a decision, and, accord- 
ing to the penetrating word of Christ, eventually always 
tend toward a Yea or Nay. Therefore to the soul of a 
disciple of Christ the question is ever present: Must I 
and will I, with folded hands, look up to the Bible as to 
the Word of God, or dare I from the throne of my reason 
to overlook it, and judge it as to its truthfulness and un- 
truthfulness, even though I do it respectfully and with 
a certain degree of reverence? No matter how much 
labor men have spent to that end, these two view-points 
can not be united, and every one is drifting, even though 
slowly and perhaps unconsciously, toward the one or the 
other. There will remain secondary questions. But why 
did God promise His children wisdom and the Holy 
Ghost, if not in order that they might search out the main 
questions of salvation, and thereby arrive at a clear, joy- 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 229 

ful faith? It is Bible doctrine, corroborated by expe- 
rience, that by virtue of direct enhghtenment through the 
Spirit this is possible among the simple and poor in spirit, 
rather than among the wise and prudent, with all their 
study. 

Augustine says, "Our eyes behold in the Scriptures in- 
asmuch as they are dead to the world; but inasmuch as 
they live to this world, they behold nothing." And Krum- 
niacher says, ''The divinity of the Holy Scriptures is ex- 
perienced by man only in the measure in which he himself 
becomes more divine." 



With what does Biblical criticism operate? It tries, 
above all else, to determine historically whether the Bib- 
lical reports are true, whether they were really written by 
the authors to whom they are ascribed, and whether they 
originated at the time at which they have so far been 
supposed to have originated. Since in many cases dates 
and reliable sources are wanting, the attempt is made to 
deduce these things from the contents of the books them- 
selves. The manifoldness, differences, and contradic- 
tions contained in the conclusions arrived at in this way 
show that here a wide domain is opened for more or less 
ingenious surmises. It can be said that in this entire do- 
m.ain there is not a single theory or hypothesis, over 
against which there is not a contradictory one. Here, too, 
the open confession of Professor Juelicher in his intro- 
duction to the New Testament applies : "In the most im- 
portant questions our knowledge is exceedingly deficient. 
Especially in regard to the individual writings we are left 
almost entirely without external testimony, and are solely 



230 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

dependent upon the knowledge we derive from the writ- 
ings themselves, whereby we are forced to a critical in- 
vestigation of details, in which hypothesis is added to 
hypothesis." 

At the same time these critics assert (and we believe 
them) : We are only seeking truth, truth at whatever 
price, even though it cost us the most revered tenets of 
faith, the most precious views that have been handed 
down to us ; we want truth ! So do we, all of us. Who 
seeks and desires falsehood as such, and for its own sake ? 
Even materialists like Vogt, Moleschott, Haeckel, even 
atheists like Nietzsche and others, seek truth, ofttimes 
very earnestly. For man was created for truth, and is 
cognizant of this fact. What man offers and recommends 
to men his view of the world, his science, his faith, as a 
lie? Who would accept his ware? But whoever strives 
for a goal, must pursue the proper course, lest he be led 
farther and farther away from it instead of drawing 
nearer to it. Therefore Christ affirms, "I am the Way," 
before he says, "I am the Truth." "No man cometh to 
the Father," therefore not to the truth, "but by Me." 
Either Christ was deceived ; either He is neither the Way 
nor the Truth, and there are other ways to the truth, 
except Him, and then His teaching is error and falsehood ; 
or He knows that He is the Truth and speaks the truth, — 
then the whole of this criticism has strayed from the right 
way, and will never arrive at truth. For it does not seek 
truth in Him. Mythologies and myths of perished na- 
tions, fragments of Babylonian and other legends, rem- 
nants of the wisdom of Indian and Egyptian priests, un- 
certain and disputed investigation of languages and 
names, for the most part uncontrollable reports, state- 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 231 

ments, assertions, opinions of persons who died long ago, 
and who, hke us, were onesided, biased, unreliable, and 
sought their own honor, — these are the sources, the au- 
thorities, from which criticism, after hundreds and thou- 
sands of years, expects with much diligence and the aid 
of reason to sift out the reliable from the unreliable, the 
true from the untrue, and to arrive at certainty concern- 
ing eternal truths. True, we are dependent upon this 
course of historic research for the establishment of his- 
toric facts ; but it is foolish to make these the touchstone 
of the supernatural and eternal, and absurd to attempt 
to prove from Babylonian monuments and inscriptions 
that there are neither angels nor devils, or to prove from 
''Roman sources" that Christ was not conceived of the 
Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. How impos- 
sible it is for criticism to arrive at absolute truth by means 
of historic investigation is shown by its contradictions. 
No two investigators interpret the historic status exactly 
alike. While Professor Delitzsch combats the Bible with 
Babel, Professor Sayce, Dr. Jeremias, Mr. Urquhart, 
and others, find there a striking justification of the Old 
Testament. 

Viewed in another phase, this criticism, in spite of its 
search after truth, and its results, arouses justified suspi- 
cion. It is an attribute of truth that it affirms, and does 
not negate ; that it gives, and does not take ; that it mani- 
fests vitality, is productive, fructifying, and fruitful; 
that it strengthens the soul, even though its severity be 
dreadful and destructive ; in short, that its vision gladdens 
the spirit in its innermost depths. Can anything of this 
joy of eternity be felt at the results of criticism? Does 
it offer fruitful thoughts, great ideas, a grand, victorious 



232 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

view of God and the world that edifies the soul, lifts it 
beyond the vain and earthly, and draws nearer to God? 
And what are the results of this more and more de- 
structive criticism? That the Biblical records of crea- 
tion, the fall, and the deluge are myths, distorted legends 
handed down from Babylon or elsewhere, is to it more 
and more a matter of course. (Besides, it invented the 
stale theory of the two records, the Jehovistic and the 
Elohistic, which is recently being rehashed in regard to 
the flood.) The Abraham of the Bible never lived; the 
Israelites found a chief of this name in the Land of 
Canaan, whom they chose as their national hero, and 
their priests saw to the further legendary embellishment. 
How about Moses, this colossal figure of a single cast, 
even though viewed only from a psychological standpoint, 
whose iron law has to this day retained an infrangible 
power among his people? Well, modern criticism says 
smiling, Moses never lived ; and Professor Delitzsch puts 
in his stead "the priestly scholar, who wrote Genesis i, 
and anxiously endeavored to eliminate all mythological 
traits from, the Babylonian records of the creation of the 
world." (Babel und Bihel.) He and his books, which 
chronologically come apter the prophets — at the time in 
which Moses is supposed to have lived the Israelites could 
not write at all (thoroughly refuted by recent discov- 
eries) — are the fabrications of unknown priests, who 
after the Babylonian captivity felt the need of giving the 
crushed nation a support. On the whole, the "great un- 
known" plays an important part in criticism. Who wrote 
"Ecclesiastes ?" Of course, Solomon did not, although 
much in the first chapter agrees verbally with what is 
otherwise reported of him, and although psychologically 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. ' 233 

the entire book is thoroughly worthy of him. (Why 
should we not have an Aramaic transcript of the He^ 
brew original? Even Renan admitted the possibility of 
this.) No, an unknown Jewish king, who disappeared 
without leaving a trace, wrote this mighty mental pro- 
duction much later. And who was Daniel, since in this 
book it repeatedly stands written, "I, Daniel?" Another 
unknown person, of whom otherwise nothing is known ; 
and my modest surmise that this unknown person might 
perhaps have been called Daniel, and have been identical 
with the prophet, does not merit serious consideration. 
"Do you really believe," a learned theologian asked me 
amazed, "that there ever lived a man named Daniel?" 
Criticism says that whatever this would-be Daniel did not 
expressly make mention of, he did not know. (Thus it 
is impossible, too, that Schiller and Goethe lived in the 
time of Napoleon I; they do not even know his name.) 
Who wrote Genesis? Who wrote Deuteronomy? Who 
wrote the Psalms of David, these incomparable lyrics, 
these effusions of character, of personality? Who wrote 
the granite prayer of Moses (Psa. xc) ? Who the second 
part of Isaiah ? Who is the author of the Books of Ezra 
and Nehemiah ? The unknown, the unknown ! Thus the 
English Bible critic Cheyne ascribes the first chapter of 
First Samuel to an "unknown" author, who, in round 
numbers, lived five hundred years after the time of the 
prophet; and Hannah's song in the second chapter he 
ascribes to another unknown person, of whom no one 
knows, when he wrote. And in a work that passes as 
orthodox, we read: "He (Eli) is stated to have judged 
Israel forty years; but this chronological notice, as also 
the statement of his age, is probably due to a later deu- 



234 THE BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

teronomic redactor." (Hastings's Bible Dictionary.) Ar- 
bitrary assertions made at random, by which they essay, 
in the presence of the unknowing, to surround them- 
selves with the halo of higher scientific knowledge. Or 
exact dates are given with astonishing certainty, and on 
the ground of incredibly weak arguments. The parables 
of Balaam, ''in which we evidently are reminded of the 
triumphs of David," and Jacob's blessing, with which 
he, dying, blessed his sons, were written in Solomon's day, 
the Ten Commandments were written in Manasseh's day, 
the unknown deuteronomist compiled the present book in 
the year 561 B. C. by blending the Elohistic and the Je- 
hovistic records, and the unknown ruler wrote Ecclesiastes 
in the year 264. Indeed, Professor Kautzsch knows that 
the Book of Daniel was written "in the early part" (prob- 
ably in January) of the year 164 B. C, and another critic 
knows that it was written in the latter part of the year 
165. Exact results of free research ! 

And here come the moderates, those who would 
mediate, who would please all, and who believe them- 
selves to be the wise ones, following the golden mean. 
Moses, they say, certainly lived; but his history must be 
considered soberly. In Midian he learned to know the 
tribal god of the nomadic Kenites, Jah, and it is probable 
that during a great thunder-storm the thought flashed 
through his soul. With this God you can rescue your na- 
tion from its tormentors. Elijah is not wholly a myth, 
he represents the then type of prophecy in its conflict 
with royalty, which conflict became historic after Samuel ; 
the chariot of fire is, of course, a thunderstorm, during 
which a prominent prophet was killed by lightning. No, 
Isaiah could not prophecy ; like Plato, he imagined an un- 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 235 

justly persecuted righteous man, and used the figure of 
his riding on an ass as expressive of his meekness. Jesus 
then orders the ass, in order to make the word of Isaiah 
a fulfiUed prophecy. And Daniel? Well, yes! But 
not the great seer, to whom superterrestrial beings re- 
veal the remotest future and the end of the world. ''He 
is to be interpreted solely in relation to the history of his 
age. His horizon does not extend beyond the Graeco- 
Syrian empire, witnessed by him." (See, contra, Dan. 
xii.) Hence not prophetic words, but political chatter- 
ings of a then statesman. And so forth. It would not 
be worth while to enter upon the attempts of these to 
make the miraculous in the Bible acceptable to the modern 
scholar; e. g., when the standing still of the star of the 
wise men is explained as being due to the hills about 
Bethlehem, which alternately hide a star, or let it appear 
to be standing still above a house. Poor wise men, who 
at anything like that could "rejoice with exceeding great 
joy." More dangerous is the effacing of the boundary- 
line between yea and nay, between truth and falsehood. 
A well-known French theologian shows "that salvation 
or damnation is not the result of a correct faith or of 
pseudo-faith, since religious faith must be distinguished 
from moral conviction, and Biblical faith {la foi biblique), 
which is essential to salvation, must be distinguished from 
faith in the Bible (la foi a la bible), which latter depends 
upon our scientific judgment." (Revue de theologie, 
May, 1897.) A German theologian repeatedly exhorts 
us, at all events to distinguish between "truth" and "in- 
fallibility." Another writes concerning the resurrection 
of Christ (and it would apply equally well to Elijah's as- 
cension to heaven), "This occurrence, though not real, 



236 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

is nevertheless true, since it presents objectively what 
subjectively busied the minds of the apostles (or of 
Elijah)." Hence a true lie! Why be zealous any longer 
against the admission of the Jesuits ? It seems to me we 
already have them among us. 

The extensive works of Biblical criticism on the his- 
toric development of Israel would be interesting (here, 
too, we must distinguish between earnest Biblical re- 
search and negative criticism), if some of them did not 
breathe hatred against the Holy Scriptures (as e. gl, 
Renan's "History of Israel," concerning which a highly- 
gifted Frenchman properly remarked to me, "Under 
every stone a scorpion!"), and if they did not all over- 
look primarily the one true God Jehovah's direct and oft- 
times wonderful guidance of the people of Israel. These 
critics do not know, and do not care to know, that this 
God really chose this people from among all nations to be 
His people, and that He led them, as a shepherd leads his 
flock ; that He is the Holy One of Israel and their watch- 
man, whose eye sleeps not and slumbers not; that His 
future purpose concerning this people includes grander 
and more glorious things than the world has ever wit- 
nessed. In the history of Israel they see nothing but the 
product of the conflict of ambitious priests with royalty, 
and of various foreign influences. Hence there can be no 
thought of a true understanding of these things. That 
is like degrading the '^ Divine Commedia" of Dante to a 
dry report of the political disturbances of the Florentine 
Republic, by eliminating from it all that is wonderful. 

Only one example of how arbitrarily criticism deals 
with the Biblical sources, the only ones we possess. In 
his "History of Israel," Dr. Winkler knows tliat the 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 237 

weather-god Jahu was known to the IsraeHtes dwelhng 
north of Judea before the time of David, but that David 
was the first to introduce the Jahwe-cult in Judea ; for, he 
argues, "we must assume that at the time of Israel's en- 
tering into Canaan, and their conquest of the country, 
there was a leader whose power and authority rested upon 
a sure foundation;" but "Joshua has no marks of an his- 
toric person," wherefore Winkler "renounces the con- 
quest under Joshua's leadership as an explanation of the 
development of things." But he used an "historically au- 
thenticated man, who united Israel in a manner historic- 
ally possible, and forced his Jahwe-cult upon it as the 
sign of its unity," and this man is David. 

"The religious peculiarity" of the people of Israel is 
either deduced from its historic fates, and daring asser- 
tions made concerning Abraham's connection with the 
dynasty of Hammurabi, and conclusions drawn from 
"names of deities, such as Khusha and Ilali, which pos- 
sibly are also Arabic," — or the ancient Arabian wor- 
ship of the heavenly bodies is brought into connection 
with old Israelitish tradition. 

The office of prophet, or "nabiism," together with 
the phenomena of ecstasy and ecstatic states, was adopted 
from the Canaanites by the servants of Jahwe, at the 
close of the period of Judges. (Whence did the Canaan- 
ites derive it? For, according to criticism, everything 
must be deduced, taken, and borrowed ; it knows nothing 
of an original and direct divine inspiration.) Others 
explain the office of prophet more "psychologically." The 
Word of God, they say, is simply "^the same inner voice 
by which God speaks to us all." and the "faculty of pre- 



238 BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 

saging* (Ahnungsvermoegen) , as it manifested itself in 
Socrates's daemon," is called in as an auxiliary in the ex- 
planation of prophecy. The visions of the prophets are 
hallucinations of the sense of sight and of hearing in con- 
sequence of affections of the nervous system. Ezekiel, 
e. g.j "suffered temporary speechlessness and lameness" 
(Bertholet) . Of course, they copied and borrowed, wher- 
ever they could. And we are justly astonished at Pro- 
fessor Delitzsch's assertion, that "they went so far as to 
ascribe the Babylonian Marduk's heroic deed (the con- 
quering of the dragon) to Jahwe" {Babel und Bibel). 

Concerning the poet who wrote the Book of Job criti- 
cism thinks : "His magnificent language, his allusions to 
cultural development, and his religious ideas show that he 
wrote at a later period of Israelitish history, approxi- 
mately about 600 B. C." (Baethgen.) (On the other 
hand, Assyriologists like Sayce, Halevy, and others, have 
shown that there was a flourishing literary age in Canaan 
as early as 2000 years B. C.) The beginning and the 
close of the book are folk-lore, the speeches of Elihu are 
spurious (why more so than those of Bildad and Eliphaz ? 
That he expresses different thoughts in a different way, 
rather argues their genuineness) ; indeed, a learned critic 
knows that when Ezekiel mentions Job together with 
Noah and Daniel on account of his righteousness, this 
does not refer to the present Book of Job, but to a "na- 
tional tract on this legend," which has disappeared with- 
out leaving a trace. Said book contained, in addition, a 
chapter on the victory of Jehovah and the defeat of Satan, 
which was dropped in the poem. The passage, ii, 10, is a 
remnant from this national book; fifty-nine verses and 
twelve parts of verses, on the other hand, are to be dis- 



• BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 239 

carded entirely. (Budde, Das Buck Hioh.) Uncanny 
omniscience or . . ' . gift of invention ! 

In spite of all sagacity, this criticism, with few excep- 
tions, lacks the noble faculty of enthusiasm and admira- 
tion. It is neither filled with moral indignation at the 
forgery and abuse of names of authors, however scandal- 
ous they may be, nor has it any appreciation of these 
works, so magnificently lofty, even apart from the Chris- 
tian belief in their divine inspiration; for the Book of 
Job, the finest, Lamartine thought, that has ever been 
written ; for the wonderful poesy of the Psalms of David ; 
for a song like "The Lord is my Shepherd !" for the deep 
and mighty earnestness of the prayer of Moses; for the 
royally priestly prayer of Solomon at the dedication of 
the temple; for the enthusiasm of Isaiah, shouting to the 
high heavens, or rushing along like a mighty stream ; for 
the lofty visions of Ezekiel ; in short, for all the beauty 
which even non-Christians have admired in the Old Tes- 
tament. It is animated by distrust toward the Bible and 
its authors ; it scents forgery and pious deceit everywhere, 
and constantly inquires with Nietzsche: "Why truth? 
Why not rather falsehood?" and thereby stands in direct 
opposition to love, which "rejoiceth not in iniquity, but 
rejoiceth in the truth, and which believeth all things." 
But, of course, what have criticism and love in common ? 

This would-be prudent criticism seems to be uncon- 
scious of the fact that it literally wades in psychological 
contradictions and inconsistencies. 

Thus the hypothesis that the law of Moses had been 
compiled after the time of the prophets is absurd "for in- 
ternal reasons" (to use this expression of criticism). 
Not only is the story of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, 



240 THH BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

which bears the stamp of truth throughout, constantly 
being corroborated by archaeological discoveries (thus 
also the Book of Joshua, which mentions the law of Moses, 
by the discoveries at Tell Amarna), but only the law of 
Sinai explains the character of Israel, and its enormous 
power of cohesion. To deny this, is to take away the 
backbone of this people, and the best and simplest expla- 
nation of its history and religion ; and the prophets have 
no other text, than the continuous disobedience of the 
nation to this law. Then all foundations are taken away, 
and we are forced to the insane attempts of criticism to 
obtain the religion of Israel by welding together frag- 
ments of various idol worships with fetishism. (Nowack 
thinks, "The Ark of the Covenant probably contained a 
stone which was considered to be the dwelling-place of 
the deity!" — the origin of the Israelitish religion.) We 
shall not speak of other and higher reasons here, for criti- 
cism does not believe that the Bible is the Word of God, 
does not believe in Divine Providence, and does not ac- 
cept the witness of Jesus. But the contradictions involved 
in this criticism will suffice. "Their Jahwe — a moralized 
idea of God, a tribal god, a god of battles, of mountains, 
of steppes, the west-semitic noon-god, an astral-theoretic 
image, a monotheistic product of legends!" {Evangc- 
lisch-lwtherische Kirchenzeitung, 1902, No. 35.) Thus 
criticism desecrates the name that should be kept holy, 
and makes the true God an idol. And this claims to be 
Christian science. Biblical theology ! 

Criticism does not feel that such sharply and strongly 
drawn images of superhuman greatness, marrowy per- 
sonalities like Abraham, Moses, Elijah, can not be post- 
fabrications, falsifications of any unknown person what- 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 241 

soever, — these unknown persons would indeed be greater 
than Goethe or Shakespeare. The spiritually powerful 
prophets, whose grand contempt of the earthly and sinful, 
and whose life in and with a holy God every unbiased 
person must feel, are said to be liars, who, in order to 
make a deeper impression upon their nation, fable-fabri- 
cated visions, and constantly assure that the Word of the 
l^ord had come to them. (We shall see, later on, how 
these contradictions multiply, when the apostles, and espe- 
cially when Jesus, is spoken of.) What all these men 
made themselves and others believe ! For evidently criti- 
cism shares the opinion of the learned philologist who 
said to me, "We can not imagine a people more stupid 
than the ancients !" 

At all events, it is remarkable that the word of these 
ignorant, superstitious men exerted so mighty an influence 
upon mankind for centuries, and that it still stands un- 
altered ; that, on the other hand, the word of critics who 
are far their superiors in scientific knowledge, in enlight- 
enment, culture, and sagacity, dies away so rapidly, and 
comparatively without effect. ''What do you want with 
your examples from the old lumber-room of rationalism?" 
exclaimed a Bible critic, who was provoked because I had 
quoted from the school of Strauss, which only fifty years 
ago was so highly lauded. Indeed, these dead ride 
swiftly. Will Ritschl and Harnack be known two thou- 
sand, nay a hundred years hence? Who will then bless 
mankind with surprising results, and with a new essence 
of Christianity ? 

In short, it is at least admitted by some critics that 
there is divine truth in the Bible. But it is a veritable 
chaos of fragments from unknown authors with fictitious 
16 



242 THU BIBLE THB WORD OF GOD. 

names, of unauthentic or purposely forged writings, is 
full of legendary personalities and invented stories. More- 
over these men are constantly uttering sentences like: 
"It is altogether incredible," . . . "It is highly im- 
probable," . . . "It can hardly be assumed," 
. . . "It is self-evident that there can be no thought 
of miracles here," . . . "Naturally the passage is 
to be explained in this manner," and it is evident that 
these scholars, shut in by their prejudices, know nothing 
of the power and riches of an inspiration through the 
Holy Ghost, have never been deeply moved by the power 
of the world to come, and by the omnipotence of a living 
God, and that their Hebrew Jahwe is as strange and in- 
different to them as the Egyptian Osiris or the Roman 
Jupiter. Here, too, it appears that much which is pro- 
claimed to be science is, after all, nothing but the faith 
of the unbeliever ; and what these gentlemen set forth as 
the results of deep scientific research is doubts and objec- 
tions, such as an ignorant peasant could advance, and 
such as uneducated scoffers adduced long before they 
were advanced by Bible criticism. 

Shall we yet make mention of the historic fancies of 
Wellhausen, which have been condemned by Assyriolo- 
gists and Egyptologists, or of the ideally inclined critics, 
to whom everything resolves into poetic images? Abra- 
ham is the myth of the rosy dawn of day, or the four 
kings from the East (Gen. xiv) are the four seasons, 
and the "five kings of cities of the plain" are the five days 
that were added to the Babylonian year in order to com- 
plete it. According to another critic, Sarah is originally 
Sharratu, the wife of the moon-god Sin ; hence Abraham 
here takes the place of the god of Harran. Jacob with 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 243 

his twelve sons represents the year with its twelve months. 
Saul is the new moon, which carries its severed head in 
its arms. "Hallelujah" is originally an appeal to the 
moon-god, and means, "Praise ye the moon!" "Sin, 
Samas, and Ister, sun, moon, and stars," are older, and 
their thoughts more fruitful and more fashioning, than 
their reflecting summary in "Jahwe Sabaoth," in the 
"Lord of the heavenly hosts." Such things are written 
by sober men of science. Whether they, like the Roman 
augurs in their day, laugh when they meet one another? 

What the aim of this criticism is. Professor Dr. Krue- 
ger, of Giessen, this champion of liberal theology, a man 
whose task it is to prepare servants of the Church for 
their high office, recently made public in his lecture on 
"Modern Science and Christianity:" "Critical research 
in the field of history has destroyed the Old Testament 
canon. There is not a theologian left, who could shut 
out this final result of Old Testament criticism. And 
it may be foreseen that, in the century just begun, the 
New Testament will suffer the same fate." Truly a sad 
performance, concerning which one does not know 
whether it should move him to tears or to laughter ! 

If the first sentiment of the Christian in view of this 
criticism is surprise and indignation at the frivolity and 
arrogant boldness with which they treat the authors and 
books of the Scriptures, this gives way, upon closer ac- 
quaintance with the same, to a feeling of weariness and 
pity, that men should devote life and strength to manu- 
facturing so many boldly phantastic or insipidly childish 
(unfortunately taken altogether too earnestly even by 
many believers), contradictory explanations, hypotheses, 
and theories, in order to prove to us at length that we 



244 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

must not believe the Bible. It would at all events be 
simpler if, in the sense of Professor Krueger, they would 
unanimously decree in a European council of criticism: 
The miraculous in the Bible is not true; the historic parts 
are altogether unreliable, and the non-miraculous and 
non-historic is a code of morals that we can prepare for 
ourselves ; let us pass this antiquated, for the greater part 
unauthentic, book by, and proceed to the order of the day. 



Let us turn to New Testament criticism. 

Learned criticism knows nothing of the connection 
between the Old and the New Testament, so clear even to 
the simple ; does not know that the former is the founda- 
tion and preparation, the latter the superstructure and ful- 
fillment, and that Jehovah is Christ; it constantly speaks 
of two wholly different religions. It is wont to ignore the 
fact that Christ constantly appeals to the Old Testament, 
and speaks of Himself as the fulfillment of the law, and 
as the One of whom all prophets prophesied. On the 
whole, the composedness with which the "views" of 
Christ, the founder and head of Christianity, are passed 
by, is one of the most astonishing facts of this criticism. 
In questions like those concerning inspiration, the Holy 
Ghost, faith in the Bible and in miracles, it would at least 
be becoming to inquire, first of all, what is taught by 
Christ, whom Christendom still, at least pro forma, with 
the mouth, and on great festivals, reveres as the founder 
of Christianity, and whom it acknowledges to be the only 
begotten Son of God, yea, God Himself, who died for us 
on the cross. For such a personality would be a source 
of first rank ; e. g., in regard to the authorship and the 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 245 

genuineness of the books of the Bible; to say nothing of 
the fact that, if Christ is indeed the Logos, the Word of 
God, by which all things were created, it is He who, 
through Moses and the mouth of the prophets, prophesied 
concerning Himself. But His enlightened, progressive 
Christianity no longer attaches any value to His Word; 
it no longer considers Him a scientific authority, a 
"source." Any known or unknown scholar, and the state- 
ment, the opinion, the passing view of any poor proud 
sinner, is considered weightier that the word of Him who 
vsaid of Himself, "I am the Truth," and of whom it is 
written, "Who did no sin, neither was guile found in His 
mouth." (i Peter ii, 22.) He says of Abraham, "Be- 
fore Abraham was, I am." "Abraham saw my day, and 
was glad." And to the Jews He says, "I know that ye 
are Abraham's seed." But criticism investigates minutely 
whether there ever was an Abraham, and whether he was 
an Israelite. Christ appeals to Moses, declares his law 
to be holy, and that from it not a jot shall pass away as 
long as heaven and earth stand ; of the life of Moses He 
corroborates the brazen serpent, the manna, the water 
from the rock, and says of his writings, "They have 
Moses and the prophets ; let them hear them." "Had ye 
believed Moses, ye would have believed Me, for he wrote 
of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye 
believe My words?" Liberal theology doubts the per- 
sonality of Moses, or says : We still believe in the words 
of Jesus, but we no longer believe in the writings of 
Moses. Jesus testifies that David had prophesied of Him 
in the fortieth Psalm, and that Isaiah had prophesied of 
Him in the sixty-first chapter; modern theologians teach 
that there is no prophecy, and that David wrote none of 



246 THE BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

the psalms of David; and the clear witness of Christ 
(Matt, xxii, 41), notwithstanding, Professor Orelli can 
not *'bring himself to consider the iioth Psalm to have 
been written by David." (Why not?) Jesus believed 
not only in the miracles of Moses, mentioned above, but 
also in Lot's wife, in Jonah in the belly of the fish, and 
his deeds are a chain of miracles. But the scribes of to- 
day make out that faith in miracles is no longer up to 
date, and is rather a hindrance to the spreading of Chris- 
tianity among the cultured. Whether we should be as- 
tonished more at the presumptuousness — a mild term — 
with which shepherds of the congregation teach the op- 
posite of what the Chief Shepherd taught, or at the in- 
difference and stupidity with which their sheep are will- 
ing to partake of such food, we do not know. Christ 
says: *'I am the door of the sheep. He that entereth 
not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some 
other way, the same is a thief and a robber." (John x, 

I. 7-) 

As these men despise the Word of the Master, so they 
despise the word of His disciples as well. In regard to 
the first three Gospels, Professor Holtzmann writes, "We 
will not deny that in the Synoptic Gospels we find both 
legends and designing narration." On the fourth Gospel, 
the author of which voluntarily and grandly withdraws, 
in order to let his beloved Master speak, he expresses him- 
self thus : *'But if, according to John xxi, 24, this Gospel 
is ascribed to the Apostle John, there can be no thought 
of its having been written by an immediate disciple of 
Jesus. Not the slightest trace of anything can be found 
that He Himself experienced! Everything is either 
taken from other sources, or is free composition accord- 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 247 

ing to definite viewpoints. In decisive points, such as the 
narration of the anointing of Jesus in Bethany, the writer 
did not understand the document used as source. In nar- 
rating the trial of Jesus before the high priest, he clum- 
sily introduces the disciple who was known unto the high 
priest." "John's appearing as the favorite disciple of 
Jesus is a certain Ephesian local patriotism," etc. 

The spurious passage is a favorite of this New Tes- 
tament criticism. How about the "three that bear 
record?" (i John v, 7.) Spurious! None of the old 
Church Fathers quote it, and it does not occur in the 
older manuscripts. (Do these manuscripts bear any 
date? Do we know all the older manuscripts, and the 
oldest original manuscript?) 

What about the angel at the pool Bethesda? (John 
V, 4.) Probably spurious; represents the belief of 
that age. 

What about the words of Jesus to the rich who trust 
in riches, a word so natural in its connection with the con- 
text? (Mark x, 24.) A gloss! Later on embodied in 
the text by a friend of the Pharisees in order to disen- 
cumber their riches. (Pray, how do they know this to 
be true?) 

Spurious also the passage that speaks of the great 
mystery, "God manifest in the flesh" (i Tim. iii, 16), 
this powerful witness for the Deity of Christ. Why? 
Or simply because it is such a powerful witness ? 

Spurious also the report of the cursing of the fig-tree 
(Matt, xxi), according to one, because this would be an 
act unworthy of Christ; according to another, because 
the power of Jesus could manifest itself in men (in the 
manner of suggestion?), but not in trees. 



248 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

Spurious also Luke v, 39 (the old is better) ; this is 
said to have been interpolated by Jewish Christians, in 
order to justify themselves in the sight of heathen Chris- 
tians on account of their observance of the law. 

Spurious the story of the adulteress, John viii, on ac- 
count, as I once read, of "too lax morals." 

There is a pretty reason given why Romans xvi can 
not be genuine: ''Because Paul could not have had so 
many acquaintances in the great metropolis Rome." 
(Twenty-seven are mentioned by name.) 

That Luke viii, 26, ff. (also Matt, viii, 28 ff., Mark 
V, 1-20, and other passages?) is spurious, criticism as- 
sumes, "for inner reasons." By virtue of these it knows 
that men can not be possessed of devils ; then how could 
demons enter into swine? 

Spurious also the command to baptize "in the name 
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," given at 
the close of Matthew's Gospel (xxviii, 19, 20). For 
Christ had no knowledge at all of the doctrine of the 
Trinity, since this doctrine dates from the fourth cen- 
tury ! 

Concerning other passages it is said : They do not fit 
into the connection, they were interpolated later from 
other Gospels, and many more such surmises made ac- 
cording to the passing subjective impression and wisdom 
of the individual. 

Here, too, one must be astonished at how criticism 
strains at gnats and swallows camels. If, as we shall 
see later, a modern theologian, and thousands of others 
likewise, declares the entire Gospel of John to be spurious ; 
if he and they deny the truth of the records of other 
evangelists concerning the birth and childhood of Jesus, 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 249 

and believe neither in His miracles nor in His resurrec- 
tion, they have such an abundance of spurious, unauthen- 
tic, fabricated passages and entire chapters in these books, 
even though such passages and chapters had originally 
been a part of the manuscript of a certain Matthew or 
Luke, that there would be no use quibbling about this or 
that spurious verse. What matters it whether the record 
that Jesus gave the command after His resurrection and 
before His ascension, "Go ye into all the world," is the 
first, or whether it was interpolated later? Jesus did not 
rise again, neither did He ascend to heaven. His entire 
history is interwoven with false reports, and is saturated 
with untruth. Then all quibbling about individual words 
seems to me to be a superfluous and paltry effort. 

We do not believe in spurious books, nor in spurious 
passages, and the negative fact usually adduced that the 
one or the other of such passages is wanting in this or 
that manuscript does not awe us. What shall this fact 
prove? Shall an author not have power to add this or 
that to his work as it appears in consecutive editions? 
And if God willed to have this or that passage written 
into His Word by way of addition, shall He not have lib- 
erty to do so ? We assume that this omniscient God, with- 
out whose will not a sparrow falleth to the earth, con- 
cerns Himself also about the composition and fate of the 
Word He has given to men. The God, says Bengel, who 
numbers the hairs on our head, has undoubtedly also num- 
bered the letters in the New Testament. If He in His 
providence has prepared these passages for mankind 
through centuries, in millions of copies and in hundreds 
of languages, then they are willed by Him, and genuine 



250 THH BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD, 

enough for us, no matter when or by whom they were in- 
terpolated. We beheve this, because, as we have already 
said concerning variants, it can not be proved that a single 
one of these presumedly spurious passages contradicts 
the spirit and analogy of the Scriptures ; on the contrary, 
they are often corroborated by other passages, the gen- 
uineness of which has up to the present not been doubted. 
Thus Paul confirms the words of the Lord regarding the 
''rich who trust in riches" by exhorting, "Charge them 
that are rich in this world that they trust not in uncer- 
tain riches, but in the living God." (i Tim. vi, 17.) 
Variants, too, can be true. If e. g., in Luther's transla- 
tion the passage, "To know the love of Christ, which pass- 
eth knowledge" (Eph. iii, 19), reads, "To love Christ is 
better than all knowledge," these words are both conform- 
able to the Holy Ghost and to the spirit of the Scriptures ; 
both are true and willed of God. We have already spoken 
of the fact that, in consequence of human guilt and of an 
easily comprehended logic of the divine world-plan, 
there has resulted an ever-increasing weakening and 
breaking up of languages, whereby a weakening of the 
original has been effected through translations. 

As is well known, Harnack, Professor of Church His- 
tory, and a follower of Ritschl, addressed himself to en- 
thusiastic Berlin audiences in sixteen lectures, in which 
he expressed his views on "the essence of Christianity;" 
published in book-form also, it has had a wide circula- 
tion. A thorough review and minute refutation of this 
book can not be our task here — others have done this — 
but it is interesting to learn to know in this most recent 
representative of modern theology the mode of treatment 
and the fundamental view of present-day (moderated) 






BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 251 

Bible criticism ; and the homage shown him on the part of 
criticism shows that this entire tendency is backing him. 
The book is not hght reading. The author is not 
wont to express in a simple manner, but to intimate dex- 
terously; he leaves things to be understood, to appear, 
he warns by hinting, adds modifying clauses, volatilizes, 
and in great measure leaves it to the reader to find out 
the meaning he really intends to convey. If he is asked 
upon what authority he bases his idea of Christianity, he 
answers, upon his own. He deals with the Scriptures ac- 
cording to his own pleasure, haughtily ignores what is 
not to his taste, puts aside as unessential what suits him 
less, and decides by virtue of his own sovereign power 
what parts of the Bible are to be believed, and what parts 
not. Professor Harnack agrees with the critic already 
quoted in saying that the Gospel of John is not genuine. 
*'This Gospel, which was not written by John, and does 
not claim to have been written by him [so cf. John xxi, 
24] , must not be used as an historic source." "The author 
acted with sovereign freedom, transposed events, and 
placed them into a strange light, composed discourses of 
his own accord [how does Harnack know this?], and 
illustrated lofty thoughts by invented situations." (Pro- 
fessor Harnack, as is usually true of critics, has made 
progress in negation ; in the preface to his "Geschichte der 
altchristlichen Literatur/' 1897, he wrote: "From a lit- 
erary and historic point of view it is genuine and reliable. 
In the entire New Testament there is probably only one 
book that is pseudonymous, the Second Epistle of Peter," 
etc. This grand book, the most glorious of the four Gos- 
pels, of which so many certainly not ordinary souls tes- 
tify that it is to them a most precious treasure, is to be 



252 THB BIB LB THE WORD OP GOD, 

considered as the work of a base falsifier, who, in order 
to gain greater authority, makes beheve that he is the 
disciple whom Jesus loved, and brazenly adds, "And we 
know that his testimony is true." (John xxi, 24.) The 
priestly prayer, as also the other discourses ascribed to 
Jesus, was composed by John, and by him fathered on 
Christ. The other three Gospels, the so-called Synoptic 
Gospels, remain. These, too, says Harnack, "were not 
written simply to report the things that were; their pur- 
pose is to awaken faith in the person Jesus Christ, and 
the depiction of His discourses and deeds serves this pur- 
pose." Hence these, too, are colored and distorted for a 
purpose. But not only this ; in the very beginning these 
men report "incredible things regarding the story of the 
birth of Jesus and the time preceding His birth." Christ 
was not conceived of the Holy Ghost (then whose Son is 
He?), and was not born in the manger in Bethlehem. 
Angels did not proclaim to the shepherds in the field the 
great joy, the birth of the great Shepherd of His people ; 
no pilgrims from the East brought gifts ; at the sight of 
Him, Simeon did not bless God that he now lets his serv- 
ant depart in peace; Herod did not murder the babes in 
Bethlehem. All these. Professor Harnack declares, and 
he certainly must know, are "stories unworthy of belief !" 
After such a statement, who will yet dare to believe in 
them? But also concerning the works of Jesus these 
evangelists report "incredible things," e. g., miracles like 
the quieting of the storm through the word of Christ, of 
which Harnack says, "We shall never believe it." Finally, 
they all mention a story of the resurrection of Jesus that 
is just as incredible as that of His birth. Therefore be- 
ginning, middle, and end of their report concerning 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 253 

Jesus, His birth, His works. His words. His resurrec- 
tion, are invented, and in this their books are altogether 
suspicious and unrehable. Then how can the works of 
men who make so Hght of lying be used as historic 
sources ? To be sure, Harnack pleases to remark, "These 
traditions are entirely Galilean; the fact, that our first 
three Gospels take no note of Jerusalem, prejudices us in 
their favor." 

Thereby Harnack assumes authority to determine 
which of the recorded words of Jesus shall be considered 
valid, and which not. The Sermon on the Mount is genu- 
ine; but the great word, "God so loved the world, that 
He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth 
in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life," was 
interpolated by John, improperly so called, and is ques- 
tionable, to say the least; and probably equally spurious 
is also the forcible word in Matthew, "All power is given 
unto Me in heaven and in earth;" in general all the words 
ascribed to Jesus after His pretended resurrection, in- 
cluding the comfortingly glorious word, "Say unto My 
brethren, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father," 
and to my God, and your God !" 

Even a non-believing but impartial judge sees that 
such procedure can not arrive at a presentation of the 
true Biblical essence of Christianity, but only at a one- 
sided and spurious Harnackian likeness of the same. To- 
morrow another scholar can just as arbitrarily accept 
what Harnack rejects, reject what Harnack accepts, and 
picture to us an entirely different, equally erroneous es- 
sence of Christianity. Then we are at the mercy of "every 
wind of doctrine." If the Word can no longer be con- 
sidered valid, where shall faith find a sure foundation? 



254 THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

'*The Holy Scriptures," says Luther, "are the only pure 
fountain of Christianity." 

In his historic conception of Christianity Harnack, 
like criticism in general, savors not the things that be of 
God, but those that be of men. Church history, as well as 
secular history, is nothing more than human workman- 
ship to them. Just as the Old Testament is supposed to 
rest upon the thoughts and fancies, the ambitious and 
imperious strivings of certain priests and prophets, so the 
entire system of Christianity rests upon the circumstance 
that in such and such year of the reign of Tiberius, under 
historic and religious influences that can not be estab- 
lished definitely, mental processes transpired, ideas origi- 
nated, clashed, and were clarified in the head of a talented 
young Jew that matured the conviction in Him that it 
was His life-task to call out to men: Be not afraid of 
God ; long reflection has led me to know Him as Father. 
Do but love your neighbor, and do good unto him, and 
all will be right. Later on it became clear to him that 
He was the expected Messiah, "a notion," remarks Har- 
nack, "to which we can no longer ascribe sense or valid- 
ity." (As though Christ were not also for us the prom- 
ised and expected true and complete fulfillment of the law 
and the prophets.) Of this idea of Christianity Harnack 
repeatedly remarks. That is very simple, quite simple. 
Yes, perplexingly simple, we admit; but the principal 
thing is wanting. 

After the death of Jesus another rabbinically educated, 
dialectically inclined Jew, named Paul, constructed from 
this so simple doctrine of Christ the entire doctrine of the 
Church, to which under the well-known "Hellenistic in- 
fluences" "the Logos idea" was added. Harnack denies 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 255 

John's already having taught that "Jesus had been the 
bodily appearance of the Logos." (Cf. John i, 14: "The 
Word was made flesh.") Paul had been the first to make 
the resurrection of Christ the center of Christian doctrine ; 
the first to teach the Deity of Christ, and the saving power 
of His death ; the first to discover in Him the fulfillment 
of prophecy, to emphasize the fulfillment of the law, and 
to organize congregations and public worship. And con- 
tradictions are not wanting between his statements and 
the Biblical portrayal of the Apostolic Church. 

Thus they deduce, combine, and construct, and the 
whole matter transpires nicely on this flat earth. To 
found this religion, in which millions will believe for 
centuries, and to which they will cling in death, criticism 
needs neither influences nor forces from above nor from 
below. Historic development takes care of all this 
through ingenious, religiously disposed, boldly specula- 
tive heads, and God and the Holy Ghost have nothing 
further to do with it. Mute and inactive — for He dare 
not intrude, He can not perform miracles, and has neither 
spirits nor angels at His disposal — this God and "Father," 
as Harnack often calls Him, observes from His heavenly 
throne — with what degree of interest, or whether with 
any interest at all, can not be determined — the historic- 
philosophic religious development of a Christian Church, 
about as He observes the progress of civilization in the 
Congo State, or the scientific play of natural forces in the 
formation of a madrepore reef in the Pacific Ocean. 

The fact that Professor Harnack employs beautifully 
veiling words, as well as words that are ardent and cer- 
tainly uttered with earnest intention, thus giving his book 
a pious. Christian tone, changes nothing in this opinion. 



256 THE BIBLH THB WORD OP GOD. 

Let us consider a few more fundamental errors of this 
book and this tendency. In his third lecture Harnack 
says : "There can be no doubt that the notion of the two 
kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the 
devil, of their conflicts, and of the future final conflict in 
which the devil, who had long since been banished from 
heaven, is also conquered on earth, — that this notion 
Jesus simply shared with His contemporaries. He is not 
the author of this notion ; He grew up in it, and retained 
it." After all, Harnack here wants to say that these no- 
tions are specifically Jewish and erroneous ones, which 
Jesus had found and unfortunately retained; and else- 
where he clearly shows that, to his mind, there is neither 
a kingdom of the devil nor a devil. Thus at the very 
start he turns the Bible topsy-turvy. From Genesis to 
Revelation the Bible teaches that man, and with him the 
earth, led astray by a fallen prince of light, is in the ban 
of the "god of this world;" that it is a question of the 
conflict between God and Satan for this world and man- 
kind; that "for this purpose the Son of God was mani- 
fested, that He might destroy the works of the devil ;" and 
that finally Satan will be cast into eternal fire, and Christ, 
as conqueror, shall reign eternally with His own in a new 
earth. If there is no devil, there is also no conflict, no 
victory, no hell; and our promised redemption from the 
latter is a myth. "To the mind of Jesus all evil and mis- 
ery belongs to the great kingdom of Satan." Yes! and 
to our mind also; for here, too, Jesus knows more than 
Harnack. This is the only true view of the world ; every 
other view is half in the air. 

How literally onesided a view of the world that must 
be that from the start denies the one of these two great 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 257 

personal principles and their conflict, this basis of all re- 
ligions, all history, and all tragedy, of all art and all soul- 
life which the individual can experience in his own per- 
son ! If there is no devil, whence is evil, this unfathom- 
able power which is manifested so personally in the per- 
secutions of Christians, in so many demoniacal persons, 
and in other ways? In the history of mankind, even to- 
day, there are fearful manifestations of mad blasphemy, 
of distracting, gnashing hatred of God, and of the sullen 
rage of so many lost, more than one of whom perceived 
and expressed, with dismal clearness, that he was the 
devil's, that he was going, and wanted to go, to the devil. 
Whoever, in view of these facts, will not recognize the 
spirit, the inspiration, yea, the presence of a higher per- 
sonality of evil, must at least admit a fall. Or is it rea- 
sonable to believe that God originally created man a blas- 
pheming being, full of sullen hatred? In the temptation 
of Christ the conflict of these two personal forces is shown 
in a manner that reaches down into the very principles of 
being, and the height and depth of which we can not 
fathom. Of this devil, Christ says : "He was a murderer 
from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because 
there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he 
speaketh of his own ; for he is a liar, and the father of it." 
Harnack and criticism teach,, there is no devil. Who 
lies? 

The denial of the notion of the devil as opponent of 
God, and of the conflict between these two, includes also 
the denial of God's wrath concerning sin and the sinner 
— di notion likewise hated by modern criticism, and which 
can not be found in Harnack. This holy wrath, which 
burns down into the nethermost hell, is the cause of the 
17 



25^ THH BIB IB THE WORD OP GOD. 

moral order of the world, and of the constant self-pun- 
ishment and self-annihilation of evil. This wrath, to- 
gether with the pointing out of the way to escape it, is a 
fundamental doctrine of Holy Writ, even beginning with 
the curse upon Adam and the field. The precursor cries 
out, "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to 
flee from the wrath to come?" Christ says, "He that be- 
lieveth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of 
God ahideth on him!'' And to His disciples He says, 
"Fear Him, which after He hath killed hath power to cast 
into Gehenna; yea, I say unto you, fear Him." But criti- 
cism knows better, and has more definite knowledge of 
the Father than the Son has. Harnack, too, knows noth- 
ing of a wrath of God, and does not believe in Gehenna. 
He says evasively: ''God does not execute justice ac- 
cording to the rule, 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth' [what 
rule does he follow?] ; His justice is subordinate to the 
power of His mercy." Well, a God who for mere pity 
winks at the evil men do, is an unjust God. But does not 
this God punish the sin of the fathers unto the fourth 
generation ? Do we not see it daily also in so-called hered- 
itary demerit ? If there is no wrath of God, why do tor- 
nadoes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions ever destroy 
thousands amid terrors and torments ? Men do not do it ; 
there is no devil; there remain only evil natural forces, 
which eventually effect such things without the will, per- 
haps without the knowledge of God. Whence the great, 
intense anguish of creation, the groaning of the creature, 
the curse of death and decay ? Why do we all die ? why 
does the worm writhe that is tread upon? why are the 
suns in world-space destroyed in the conflagration of 
worlds ? Will we deny all this with a glib smile, and say, 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 259 

The world, as it is, is quite beautiful and good? Who- 
ever has seen, in insane asylums, in hospitals for incura- 
bles, or in the presence of despairing death, a small part 
of the great suffering of mankind, must confess with a 
sigh : Here below we live under the wrath of God, and 
yonder we shall be amenable to the same, unless some one 
take away our guilt. Against this consciousness in the 
deepest soul of the millions the comfort of criticism avail- 
eth nothing. 

Yes, God is love. But he is also a just God ; and he 
would not be a just God if he did not punish evil. With 
terrible earnestness the Bible warns vis against the judg- 
ment that will some day be passed upon all flesh that has 
sinned, and cries out : "Do not err. It is a fearful thing 
to fall into the hands of the living God !" "Our God is 
a consuming fire!" The prophets and Revelation pro- 
claim an eternal fire, kept for the devil and his angels and 
"whosoever are not found written in the Book of Life," 
"and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever 
and ever." Jesus, who was so kind, repeatedly confirms : 
"There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." "Where 
their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." But 
liberal theological research has done away with these 
things. With an air of superiority Harnack writes, how 
in the soul of Jesus the coming of the kingdom of God 
had at first been reflected "in dramatic traits." "At the 
close of the drama he beholds Himself at the right hand 
of His Father, and His twelve disciples sitting upon 
thrones and judging the twelve tribes of Israel ; so clear, 
so entirely in keeping with the ideas of His age, all 
this stood before Him." But later on, Harnack thinks, 
"all the dramatic in an exterior historic sense, and all ex- 



26o THB BIBLB THB WORD OP GOD. 

terior hope for the future vanished" from the discourses 
of Jesus. Old, rejected notions ! This Jesus withdraws 
all claim to coming again and judging the quick and the 
dead. We need no longer fear either judgment, or dam- 
nation, or hell. 

God is not angry. Then why repentance and conver- 
sion? Why distress of sin, contrition, the terrible soul- 
struggles of so many pious persons, such as Luther and 
Calvin, the cry of David, "O Lord, rebuke me not in thine 
anger, neither chasten me in Thy hot displeasure?" 
Whence the complaint of Paul, "O wretched man that I 
am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? 
"I see a law of sin in my members." Self-torment all, 
without a motive, looked upon by a good God with a 
kindly smile as utterly unnecessary excitement and emo- 
tion of the soul. Why, too, the whole dispute bearing 
upon justification by faith or by works? We are not 
in need of justification. God has nothing against us. 
Neither does He need to "begin a good work in us and 
perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." We seek Him, 
grow into sonship, and come to be "saints of God." All 
this we can do ourselves, and need no assistance from 
another. 

It is well known that modern theology, in accord with 
modern enlightenment, has almost unanimously done 
away with miracles. 

Concerning these, Harnack in the first place admits, 
"Who has here measured off exactly the domain of the 
possible and the real ?" and agrees with many non-Chris- 
tians even, such as the great physicist Tyndall, and even 
the atheist Buechner, who openly admit: We know too 
little to be able to determine what is possible and what 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 261 

is impossible. But how does this agree with Harnack's 
next and unclear sentence, "It is certain, that there are 
no miracles; but there is enough of the miraculous and 
inexplicable?" And he continues, "We do not believe, 
and never again shall believe, that the earth ever stood 
still in its course, that an ass spoke, that a storm at sea was 
stilled by a word; but that the lame walked, the blind 
saw, the deaf heard, we shall not abruptly reject as il- 
lusion." As though there were lesser and greater, easier 
and more difficult, possible and impossible miracles. 
Either — or. It is a pity, then, that Harnack did not give 
us a catalogue of credible and incredible miracles, instead 
of his worthless division of miracles into five classes (why 
just five?). We should like to know where the miracle 
of Cana, the multiplying of bread, the healing of the dis- 
tant servant of the centurion, and of the distant daughter 
of the Canaanite woman belong. The raising of Lazarus 
and of the youth of Nain no doubt belong to the impossi- 
ble. With the well-known modern assertion that Christ 
had attached little value to His miracles (which, after all, 
has no bearing upon the question, whether there are 
miracles or not), Harnack contradicts the clear words of 
Christ, "The works that I do in My Father's name, they 
bear witness of Me." To the Jews He says, "If I had not 
done among them the works which none other man did, 
they had not had sin; but now have they both seen and 
hated both Me and My Father." (John xv, 24.) And 
this was their sin, that they did not believe in the miracles 
of Christ, and this the ground for the greater condemna- 
tion of Chorazin and Bethsaida, compared with Tyre and 
Sidon. (Matt, xi, 21, 22.) Could Christ have attached 
any greater value to His miracles ? 



262 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

It goes without saying, that criticism, being so shy of 
miracles, does not believe in the bodily resurrection of 
Christ. Harnack refers almost with contempt to the 
records of the same. *'If this resurrection meant noth- 
ing more than that a dead body of flesh and blood had 
been quickened again, we should at once have done with 
this tradition." That certainly means, we should no 
longer give attention to such tales. Elsewhere Harnack 
writes (quoted by Professor Baumann in ^^Die Grund- 
frage der Religion") : *'The mere fact that adherents 
and friends of Jesus were convinced that they had seen 
Him after His resurrection does not offer the slightest 
reason for the assumption that Jesus did not remain in 
the grave. What the disciples saw can not help us." 
Thus a criticism, pretending to be unbiased and without 
presuppositions, treats the most immediate and venerable 
sources, when their statements do not fit its system. 
Thereupon Harnack rejects the "Easter message," but 
demands "Easter faith," and speaks of Christ as one still 
living. Here again the well-known spiritual valuation of 
positive facts. But let us avoid subterfuges, and call 
things by their name. Resurrection from the dead means 
resurrection from the dead, and has never signified mere 
spiritual existence after death. True, Christ was alive 
even when His body lay in the grave; with the dying 
thief He went to paradise, and preached to the spirits in 
the nether world ; but neither He nor His disciples ever 
understood this to be His "rising again the third day." 
After His death He did not show them merely His spir- 
itual hands and feet, and did not partake merely of spirit- 
ual food in their presence, and with them. It would be 
silly and ridiculous, if any one should report definitely 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 263 

concerning the resurrection of Schiller a few days after 
his death, and how he had eaten and drunk with him, and 
then should explain that he had meant Schiller's continued 
spiritual existence, and the enormous distribution of his 
words and works through the firm Cotta! Here, too: 
either — or. Christ repeatedly declares that He would 
rise again from the dead the third day. He did rise again. 
So the Scriptures report ; so true, earnest, sober men wit- 
ness most definitely. They not only say, "We have not 
followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known 
unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
but were eyewitnesses of His Majesty" (2 Peter i, 16), 
but they also report, "We, witnesses chosen before of 
God, did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the 
dead." (Acts x, 41. ) Verily, an impudent lie, or a grand 
truth ! Why did they firmly declare this ? What advan- 
tage did they seek in doing so? What did they gain by 
it ? Scorn and derision on the part of the Jews and Greeks, 
imprisonment, chains, scourging, and a martyr's death, 
— this is what they gained by the report that a God had 
been crucified, and had risen again the third day. But 
they lived and died for the witness : Christ is risen again 
from the dead. He is risen indeed. 

Paul is right in emphasizing the absolutely indicative 
significance of this fact for the whole of Christian faith, 
when, after enumerating the witnesses of the resurrection 
of Christ, he, nobly indignant, addresses the Corinthians : 
"How say some among you that there is no resurrection 
of the dead ? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, 
then is Christ not risen ; then is our preaching vain, and 
your faith is also vain ; then are we found false witnesses 
of God, because we have testified of God that He raised 



264 THB BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD, 

up Christ !" And he bursts out into the pathetic lamenta- 
tion : "If Christ be not raised, ye are yet in your sins ! 
Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are per- 
ished! If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we 
are of all men most miserable." "If the dead rise not, 
let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." ( i Cor. xv, 
12-19, 32- ) He is right in emphasizing, "If thou shalt 
confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe 
in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, 
thou shalt be saved." (Rom. x, 9.) Is Christ not risen, 
then His mission is wanting the divine seal, and we have 
not a single proof that His doctrine, however grand, and 
the faith of all His disciples and of all Christendom is 
not, as the materialist claims, the product of the mole- 
cules of His brain and the brain of others, and that after 
death they, like these molecules, will flit away in space. 
He had to return, bodily, tangible, in order to prove that, 
as promised. He had conquered death by His death, and 
had burst the gates of Hades. "I live, and ye shall live 
also." The unique force of this proof was felt by the 
keen scoffer Talleyrand, when, being asked by a philan- 
thropist, "How shall I make men believe that my invented 
religion is the true one?" answered, "Have yourself cruci- 
fied, and rise again the third day." This proof is lacking 
in Mahomet, Buddha, Confucius. Whatever they may 
have taught, they never returned to announce to us that 
their word is valid over there also, that they had con- 
quered death, and were now and eternally of the living. 

If Christ is not risen, Harnack's subsequent, far- 
fetched, and unclear contemplations on the possible merits 
of His sacrificial death, which are in the spirit of present- 
day criticism, are uncertain and useless speculations. But 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 265 

if He is risen, He is truly He whom He claims to be, 
the only begotten Son of God. Then He will also return 
again bodily, and will "change our vile body, that it may 
be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to 
the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things 
to Himself," (Phil, iii, 21.) 

This brings us to the main point, to the pith of New 
Testament criticism, and also of Harnack's work. Of a 
book entitled "The Essence of Christianity" a Christian 
expects that it show Christ as the Central Sun that il- 
luminates the whole. Christianity is not morals, nor vir- 
tue, nor piety ; it is not fear of God, nor love of neighbor ; 
not good works, and not a life of highest ideals, devoted 
to the welfare of humanity and to the contemplation of 
God. "For the Gentiles also do even the same." Chris- 
tianity is the enormous, incomprehensible, incredible fact, 
and converting and sanctifying faith in the fact that God 
was made flesh in order to save a world that had fallen 
away from Him, and was rushing headlong toward the 
abyss. This God, the only begotten, who dwelt with the 
Father in unspeakable glory "before the foundations of 
the world," said in the fullness of time, "Lo, I come (in 
the volume of the Book it is written of me), to do Thy 
will, O my God." He, "the brightness of the glory of 
the invisible God," He, "of whom and by whom all things 
are created," came down ; "the Word was made flesh and 
dwelt among us," and "God was in Him, reconciling the 
world unto Himself." "In Him dwelleth all the fullness 
of the Godhead bodily." "Behold the Lamb of God that 
taketh away the sin of the world." "Surely He hath 
borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; the chastise- 
ment of our peace was upon Him ; and with His stripes 



266 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

we are healed;" "For God hath made Him to be sin for 
us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the right- 
eousness of God in Him." "Having made peace through 
the blood of His cross, all things are reconciled by Him 
unto Himself, whether they be things in earth, or things 
in heaven." "By one offering He hath perfected forever 
them that are sanctified." "Who is gone into heaven, and 
is on the right hand of God, angels and authorities and 
powers being made subject unto Him." And now "the 
blood of Christ cleanseth us from all sin," and God makes 
that "we may abound to every good work." "There is 
therefore now no condemnation to them which are in 
Christ Jesus. Who shall lay anything to the charge of 
God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that 
condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is 
risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who 
also maketh intercession for us." "Let us look for that 
blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God 
and our Savior Jesus Christ." He said, "Behold, I come 
quickly, and My reward is with Me." "To him that over- 
cometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as 
I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in 
His throne." "And the Spirit and the bride say. Come." 
"Even so, come. Lord Jesus !" 

This is the Biblical essence of Christianity. But the 
Deity of Christ, the corner-stone and foundation of true 
Christianity, is a grievous annoyance to criticism ; for by 
this it is condemned. 

Does Harnack teach and confess this Christ, God from 
eternity? No one, not even he himself, will affirm it. It 
is indeed difficult here to husk the kernel of his faith out 
of the multitude of phrases ; but this much is easily clear : 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 267 

His Christ is only a man, who by virtue of his own knowl- 
edge makes Himself Son, and who by virtue of His own 
power makes himself the Holy One of God. His view of 
Christ he summarizes in the following words, which he 
underscores: ''The Son does not belong in the Gospel, 
but only the Father/' Hence a Christianity without 
Christ. But it is written, "No man knoweth the Father, 
save the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him." 
Harnack's book is a new proof of this statement. He has 
not the Father either. He does not know the true, holy, 
just, punishing, jealous, living, mighty God of the Bible, 
because he desires to come unto Him in some other way 
than by Him who says, "/ am the way, the truth, and the 
life; no man comet h unto the Father, but by Me/' He 
has created his God in his own likeness. 

What need is there, then, of extensive discussion? 
Here there is a gulf fixed between faith and criticism. In 
view of all this, shall we spend any time considering Har- 
nack's discussion of Christ's relation "to the question of 
asceticism," "to the social question," "to the question of 
right or of culture ?" What would it profit ? These views 
of a young man who lived nearly two thousand years ago 
may be of historic interest ; but they can not set the pace 
for our advanced and enlightened age. This Jesus of 
criticism, this poetic figure of a pious Jew by the Sea of 
Tiberias, profits us nothing. He does not take away our 
sin, and, after all, this "Essence of Christianity" leaves 
us as cool as the Islam, or as Buddhism. 

Poor Jesus, grown up and shut up in so many er- 
roneous notions of Your age, and yet the "Holy One of 
God," had You but been permitted to sit at Harnack's 
feet, this master would have taught You correcter ideas of 



268 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

the essence of Christianity. He would have healed You 
of Your fear of the devil and his temptations; of the 
fancy that You were able to command winds and waves ; 
of the delusion that You had raised Lazarus, and that 
You Yourself would rise again the third day. He would 
have proved to You that You were only a man, and that 
You could impossibly have dwelt with the Father in 
Your own glory before the foundation of the world. He 
would have shown You that You do not belong in the 
Gospel at all; for thousands of Christians ( ?) now en- 
thusiastically recognize that he, and not You, is the true 
teacher of true Christianity. 

We, however, continue to sit at the feet of this Jesus ; 
and He says to us : ''Be not ye called teachers ; for one 
is your Teacher, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. 
Neither be ye called masters; for one is your Master, 
even Christ." (Matt, xxiii, 8, lo.) 



And what does this modern and this Harnackian 
theology foot up for eternity? For the touchstone of 
every religion is its answer to the question. What do you 
offer for us for the beyond ? What do you give us, not 
for this brief space of time, but for a long eternity? As 
well have none at all, as a religion, a theology, which is 
useful for this world alone. "If in this life only we have 
hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." The 
goal of religion is: ''Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
neither have entered into the heart of man, the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But 
God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit." ( i Cor. 
ii, 9, 10.) What does liberal theology offer us? It was 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 269 

heresy, that "the Spirit that raised up Christ from the 
dead shall also quicken our mortal bodies" (Rom. viii, 
1 1 ) ; a beautiful dream is the word : ''It is sown in cor- 
ruption; it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dis- 
honor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it 
is raised in power!" There is no resurrection of the 
body ; let it go ! Hence there is neither any new earth, nor 
a new Jerusalem in it, the inhabitants of which, clothed in 
white garments, pass in and out at the pearly gates ; and 
why should there be? A well-known Christian professor 
writes, "All that has ever been said concerning the heav- 
enly life, is fantasies." (The twenty-first chapter of 
Revelation also?) What remains? A so-called better 
beyond, misty and shadowy, of which we know practically 
nothing, but of which we must hope that all honest and 
pious people go there. Where do the remainder go, since 
there is no hell? How about the final judgment? Shall 
a just God never pass judgment on all the injustice done 
on earth? Shall this earth, stained with guilt and sin, 
eternally speed through space, or some day sink back into 
nothingness ? 

This so-called modern theology preaches again with 
new words the old heresies of Arius and Pelagius, and 
those of the Sadducees, who "say that there is no resurrec- 
tion, neither angel, nor spirit" (Acts xxiii, 8), and this 
would-be progressive science takes us back many centuries 
to the standpoint of all pious heathen. Socrates and Plato 
hoped to come nearer to the Deity after death. Epictetus 
and Marcus Aurelius and the Greeks believed in the re- 
gions of the blessed (which they distinguished from Tar- 
tarus, the place of torment), and when Paul spoke to the 
Athenians concerning the resurrection of the dead, "some 



2 70 THB BIBLH THH WORD OP GOD, 

mocked." If this is all criticism can offer us, then why 
this whole array of eloquence and research? why science 
and theology? Let us lead morally virtuous lives, culti- 
vate religiosity and moral earnestness, but without anx- 
iety; for there is no judgment, no devil, and no hell, and 
of ourselves we shall some day arrive in a better beyond. 
For a hope and a faith like these, which are shared by sav- 
age peoples also, by Yakuts and Tierra del Fuegans, we 
need neither Bible nor Biblical criticism, neither Chris- 
tianity nor Harnack. 

Why is this modern theology so sober and prosy, with- 
out grand homogeneous conceptions of the world and the 
cosmos? Why is its universe so empty, its heaven so 
cloudy, its God so lonely and speechless ? Why does the 
whole of it seem so unsatisfactory and superficial to the 
Christian? Because in it the true living God and His 
breath is wanting. These cold lecture-rooms, in which 
a man by force of brain demonstrates God and the world; 
in which the ceiling hinders the view and the flight up- 
ward, and in which the horizon embraces only what can be 
seen from the professor's platform, are narrow and empty 
and tedious to the believer, who is accustomed to holding 
blessed communion with God in prayer; who has felt His 
presence, has tasted His goodness, and in His light has 
seen the light; but who has also wrestled with the princes 
and powers of darkness, and with the god of this world. 
''The soul and God, God and the soul !" Harnack ex- 
claims, and many are content with this motto. We are 
not ; it rather frightens us. For God and the soul are in- 
commensurable quantities. Is it not written: "God 
dwelleth in the light which no man can approach unto?" 
Then how will you, poor man, approach unto Him? 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 271 

What has your Httle, finite, sinful, impotent, ignorant 
soul in common with the great, holy, omnipotent, omnis- 
cient God ? What has the little, crippled butterfly of this 
earth in common with the sun, two millions of miles dis- 
tant, and radiant in its plentitude of dazzling light ; what 
in common with the sun's oceans of heat^ and its torna- 
does of fire? Astronomy teaches that if a youth could 
be up with the ray of light, and fly toward the beautiful 
sun Alcyone, he would perish in space of withering old 
age, before he could perceive any change in the luster and 
size of the star. Even so the soul that on its own pinions 
would wing its way to God. God is far away. And if 
the Eternal should approach the soul in a divine thunder- 
storm, how would it fare ? Can the moth live in the melt- 
ing heat of the furnace, or can the sin-bespattered soul 
stand before the countenance of Him in whose sight even 
angels are not clean? "No man shall see God and live." 

Here modern theology knows no counsel, and needs 
none. Its God is incapable of wrath ; sin is only unpleas- 
ant to him, and, whether or not, he is bound by natural 
law^s and otherwise. He can neither answer prayers, nor 
hurl the thunderbolts of his wrath upon the earth, nor 
rise from his throne and meet the soul. He does not hear 
its petitions; how should he answer them? The soul 
must do it all. And it is able to do it all. Through 
religious and scientific training it is able to mount on 
high, to attain to sonship through speculation, and to be- 
come a saint of God ; to this end it needs neither repent- 
ance, nor conversion, nor the sacrificial death of Christ. 

Not so the Bible. It says : Fallen man can not come 
to God, and can not stand before God ; the finite creature 



272 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

can know nothing concerning the infinite Creator. There 
must be found a Mediator and High Priest; a God, in 
order that He have power to approach God, and to stand 
before Him; a man, in order that he have knowledge of 
our misery, and can be touched with the feehng thereof. 
But the Son came down, was made man, and is the only 
Mediator between the soul and God; His name is Im- 
manuel ! — God with us ! He ascended to heaven again ; 
He sits again at the right hand of Majesty. He will come 
again and take us with Him, in order that where He is, 
there we also may be. And because He is "the Word 
of God," this Word from heaven, in opposition to mere 
human wisdom, knows great and heavenly things. This 
Christ showed Himself to the prophets in His glory, on 
cherubim, borne by flashing wheels of life, and His Word 
tells us of sons of God who shouted when He created the 
earth; it tells us of angels of mighty power, who protect 
children, and bear souls heavenward; of princes of light, 
who contend with princes of darkness for the nations 
and worlds committed to them (cf. Dan. x, 13) ; of great 
counsels of God, and of seers, and of watchmen in heav- 
enly places ; of terrible final judgments, and of the shin- 
ing of the sun after the storm has passed. And from 
the seven spirits of God there proceed grace and peace, 
and from the throne of God there proceed voices, thunder 
and lightning, grand blessed revelations which man be- 
low is not permitted to know. "Seal up those things 
which the seven thunders uttered ;" unspeakable paradisi- 
acal words, which no man can utter. This Word offers 
the believer a grandeur and beauty of creation and Crea- 
tor, such as the mind of man never dreamed of ; a reveling 
in time and space, in power and might, in infinite, mate- 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 273 

rial, and spiritual forms of life; a shouting of victory, 
and overw^helming joy of eternity, such as no poet ever 
fancied. These are things, of course, which men with 
dried-up souls, men of whom only the head is alive, re- 
gard with a shrug of the shoulder as the fantasies of 
poetic souls, with which they embellish their religion. 
But they satisfy, satiate, and strengthen the heart, this 
wonderful something in us, that can not live on dry, ab- 
stract things, but thirsts after concrete things, after great 
joys, after beautiful realities. Just as God gave men 
eyes to see, ears to hear, and hands to grasp, so the soul 
created by Him demands ideas that crystallize to visi- 
bility, a harmony of things that begets a grand, audible 
Te Deum laudaimts^ and an eternal life that hands can lay 
hold on, and that can be viewed by light ; in short, it de- 
mands ready, genuine, shining gold, and will not be put 
off with. the paper drafts and stocks of modern founders, 
which can nowhere be redeemed. 

So-called modern criticism, which is coming more and 
more exclusively to be a mere criticism of the form and 
husk, is unable to offer anything that is concrete, true, and 
real, because it despises the only source of truth, the 
divine Word. Here there is no "And God said," but, / 
know that, / find that, / make out, / prove, / surmise that. 
. . . But despite all wisdom, I do not know whence 
nor whither ; do not know what is above nor what is be- 
low ; do not know why there is guilt and sorrow ; do not 
know how it is to end, and who will redeem us; for our 
daily existence proclaims with fearful impressiveness that 
we are not able to do it. It knows little of the present 
creation, and nothing of the eternal; its overestimation 
of its own wisdom and knowledge is consistent only with 
18 



274 THB BIBLE THE WORD OE GOD. 

a small conception of the universe, and can be explained 
only on the ground of such a conception. 

Christianity among Germans must have degenerated 
sadly to make it possible for them to regard with awe and 
admiration a picture as arbitrary, as superficial, and as 
contradictory to the Bible as Harnack's "Essence of Chris- 
tianity.'' It can not seem strange that the book was wel- 
comed with rejoicing by disguised and open opponents 
of the cross of Christ and of His Word, as a riddance 
from the hated, unrelenting truths of the Scriptures, or, 
as they say, from a dogmatic Christianity; but It must 
seem strange that believers, too, blinded by beautiful 
words, and by some elements of truth, are deceived In re- 
gard to the contents of the book, which is so clear to the 
discerning reader. The opinions of opponents of Chris- 
tianity, or of such as remain distant, might open their 
eyes. The clear-sighted Ed. v. Hartmann, e. g., writes 
{Deutschland, No. i) : *'I find in the unique divine 
human nature of the Redeemer Jesus Christ the feature 
that distinguishes the Christian religion from all other 
religions. Judged from this standpoint, liberal Protes- 
tantism and the left wing of RItschlianIsm no longer 
come under the Idea of Christianity." And elsewhere he 
says: *'What Harnack's work has revealed, is really 
nothing more than the self-decomposition of RItschlian- 
Ism; and this Is another halting-place on the way of the 
self-decomposition of Christianity." And the liberal 
Rev. Georg Schneider rejoices: "To us this book has 
seemed to be a splendid justification of unbelief, and a 
declaration of war against the confessional Church, as 
bold as It could well have been made. ... It wit- 
nesses that. In the eyes of science, faith in the crucified and 
risen God has seen its day." 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 275 

If we ask, astonished, why the Church endures such 
procedure, and why it suffers that, in its seminaries and 
foundations and higher institutions of learning, eager 
young men, its future servants, are reared in heresies that 
are in direct opposition to the confession of the Church, 
high pubhc officials of the Church declare, that in theolog- 
ical chairs "every tendency must be granted air and 
light," or, to speak plainly, every one must be at liberty 
there to teach what he pleases; for, others add sancti- 
moniously, it would be sad indeed if the Church had to 
bar out every free utterance, and had not power enough in 
itself to overcome error. Excellent gardeners forsooth, 
who say: In our garden air and light must be granted 
every kind of weed; our little plants will defend them- 
selves against whatever endangers their existence. What 
manner of father is he, who, being told that his children 
are eating the fruit of the deadly nightshade, or poison 
toadstools in the forest, answers coolly: Just let them 
eat; their good constitution will overcome the poison. 
What manner of educator he, whose principles were: I 
permit my pupils to read bad books, to see bad examples, 
and to associate with bad company ; it would be sad if the 
power of good training did not gain the victory. Then 
let us in the Church and the State, in the school and in 
the family, freely grant air and light to that which is evil 
and false ; we believe that the good and the true will surely 
conquer. 

Yes, we too believe that the truth will some day con- 
quer, and we also believe that God can gain this victory 
without our aid; but then we shall be the losers. Yes, 
the Word of God will some day flash forth like the sun 
from dark clouds, and will strike down its enemies; but 



276 THB BIB LB THE WORD OP GOD. ■ 

it will also, in the day of judgment, lay those low who 
say concerning the living God, what the father of Gideon 
once said concerning Baal : "If he be a god, let him plead 
for himself, because one hath cast down his altar." 



What results has Biblical criticism matured? The 
well-kown champion of criticism in France, the late Pro- 
fessor Sabatier, thought, "Toute la theologie est a re- 
jaireT — All theology must begin again from the begin- 
ning; that which has been handed down, belongs to old 
iron. A German theologian, to whom I put the above 
question, answered less radically, "Well, at the present 
time we can not yet speak of results; it is all unsettled 
yet." But this answer was perhaps too modest ; for this 
criticism, as we have seen, can amply furnish negative 
results. Revelation? No. Inspiration of the Bible? 
No. Trinity? No. Fall? No. Devil, angels? No. 
Miracles? No. Decalogue from Sinai? No. Wrath 
of God? No. Prophecy? No. Christ God? No. Rec- 
onciliatory death of Jesus ? No. Did Christ rise again ? 
No. Resurrection of all the dead, and final judgment? 
No. Criticism, this child of the spirit that always negates, 
takes everything from us ; but it gives us nothing. What 
do all these negations profit me? What shall I do with 
them? It causes one to stand on the path of life like a 
freezing wanderer, totally bereft, clad only in a thin shirt 
of morality, and not knowing whither to direct his steps. 

Why are we (and our stay is brief enough) in this 
world? Is it not that we might seek God, and, having 
found Him, love Him and his dear Son, whom He gave 
for us ; obey Him, believe in His Word, and show forth 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, ^77 

our faith in good works ? What have we in this poor life 
that is of much account save a Httle love, a little faith, 
and a little hope? Does criticism help us to love, to be- 
lieve, and to hope ? No. In the lecture-room and in the 
study, when delivered fluently in learned treatises and in 
scientific addresses, it is quite nice, noble, and presenta- 
ble. But in view of the terrible, shocking realities of ex- 
istence, mankind truly needs something better than theo- 
ries, be they ever so brilliant; better than deductions, be 
they ever so ingenious. In the hard daily struggle we 
need strength and patience from above. We need com- 
fort when the heart is bleeding, torn by the thorns of 
life, or at the grave of loved ones. We need help when 
despair draws near, and when frenzy threatens the soul, 
on account of annihilating misfortune, or inexpiable 
guilt. In the last hour, when conscience accuses our life, 
we are to receive weapons against the terrors of death and 
judgment. We must have a Father who hears and an- 
swers our cries and petitions, and some one who takes 
away the crushing burden of our guilt. We want to rise 
again some day, and finally be at home, body and soul, 
with this Father. 

And because criticism of the Bible does not give us 
this, but the Bible without criticism has given it to us and 
to thousands, we prefer the latter. 

"There must be criticism!" we hear even believing 
theologians and non-theologians announce, as a self-evi- 
dent and irrefutable dogma of modern times. W^hy? 
Where is it written ? As long as I find no trace of criti- 
cism in the prophets and apostles, yea, in Christ, the in- 
carnate Word that is God, but find there only uncondi- 
tional faith in the Scriptures, I consider it advisable rather 



278 THB BIB LB THE WORD OP GOD, 

to follow them in this also. When, on the other hand, I 
see from the history of the Church how so many thou- 
sands of g'odly Church fathers and martyrs, apostles and 
missionaries to the heathen, reformers, confessors, and 
believers did such great things in God and with God, what 
godly lives they lived, and how happy they died, without 
knowing or wanting to know anything of criticism, I say 
confidently. Criticism must not be. Indeed, if I compare 
these non-critics with the critics, and the non-critical 
Church, many hundred years old, with the present critical 
Church, the conviction is forced upon me more and more, 
that the above sentence should be amended thus: Criti- 
cism ought not to be ! 

If we inquire after the ever-spreading spiritual in- 
fluence of this criticism, the results are unfortunately 
quite visible. That this criticism has undermined, and to 
,a great extent destroyed reverence for the Word of God, 
that despite all talk of "Father" it has removed Him to 
an unapproachable distance from us, and has robbed Him 
of the power and the willingness to hear our petitions and 
help us, is too evident to be denied. Like blighting mil- 
dew it has fallen upon thousands of young souls, and has 
robbed them of their lively hope, their childlike faith, 
their first love. Are these the effects of divine truth? 
Nevermore ! 

By virtue of criticism we are not only without faith, 
but also without character. Darwinism, refuted in science 
by the force of facts, but not so tangibly refutable in phil- 
osophic branches, has added materially to the lack of 
clearness in our spiritual life, and Professor Vaihinger, 
of Halle, is right in tracing Nietzsche's doctrine back to 
"a new valuation of Schopenhauer under the influence 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 279 

of Darwinism." But Biblical criticism, too, is a cause 
of the uncertain, wavering present-day life, which is ex- 
posed to every wind of foolish doctrine. And since lit- 
erature and art are products of this life, it is indirectly 
also the cause of the miserable productions of both, such 
as the modern representations of Jesus in art and litera- 
ture. Only firm faith of some kind helps man attain to a 
homogeneous view and conception of the world, and only 
such a view and conception can make him capable of 
great, forceful, and fruitful activity. But whence shall 
such view and conception come to those who, in the fun- 
damental questions of existence, waver between dozens of 
contradictory opinions; who look to Harnack to-day for 
the essence of their Christianity, after they had looked to 
Ritschl yesterday, and to Schleiermacher or Baur the day 
before yesterday, and who do not know where they shall 
liave to look for it ten years hence ? 

Instead of the ''It is written," with which our Lord 
and Master conquered the mightiest opponent, we ask: 
Is it written? Where? Who wrote it? Is the passage 
genuine? Who will prove it? The foundations under 
us totter, and from bogs and swamps there rise up mists 
that hide from us the view of the eternal peaks, clad in 
radiant white. A malarial atmosphere of doubts and un- 
certainty envelops our spiritual life, forces its way into 
our schools, and even into our Churches, and poisons 
our Christian literature; we and our children breathe it 
wherever we are, and it makes us wavering and defense- 
less outwardly, and sick and languid inwardly. 

How void of judgment we have come to be is shown 
by the fact that many confess the Deity of Christ, and 
in the same breath doubt the truth of the Old Testament, 



28o THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

the Bock which this God-man in opposition to the world 
and Satan posits, with the absolute word, "It is written," 
as ''the Scriptures that can not be broken," as "the law 
of which not a jot or tittle shall pass away;" and he re- 
peatedly appeals to Moses, David, and the prophets. That 
is to say, Christ is God; but, in His opinion of the Old 
Testament, this God is deceived. He has overestimated 
His own Word, and especially His law from Sinai. In 
this we dare not follow Him blindly. 

Biblical criticism has brought about, that almost no 
Christian any longer distinguishes clearly between yea 
and nay, truth and falsehood, light and darkness, children 
of God and children of the devil, Christ and Belial. These 
are indeed Biblical expressions, but they are unparlia- 
mentary and obsolete. We now speak only of a more or 
less decided, or moderate, or positive tendency ; of a more 
liberal and progressive view ; of an unbiased, Protestant, 
or a stricter Lutheran standpoint, of a more or less out- 
spoken left wing or right wing, of liberal, liberally- 
minded, or orthodox theology, and what more there may 
be of indefinite expressions that suit our pale spiritual 
life, and the indistinctness of which harms our thought 
and our soul. It is not a question of blessedness and 
damnation, of heavenly bliss and hellish torment, of 
Satan in the lake of fire, of cherubim around the throne 
of God, and of victors clothed in white, and palms in 
their hands ; of redeemed and saints ; of lost and damned. 
To us these are no longer lofty, shocking realities, but 
mediseval conceptions for the multitude, figurative ex- 
pressions, customary only in pietistic circles, or in Meth- 
odistic conventicles, or in pious hymns. Whether Christ 
is the Son of God, and whether by His death He saved us 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 281 

from future wrath or not, are theological questions on 
which opinions may differ; more interesting are lectures 
on Babylonian legends, or on the relation of Byzantine 
art and renaissance to Christianity. Above us, God waits 
for us in an eternal sea of love and blessedness ; beneath 
us Gehenna hisses and bubbles ; this day yet thousands of 
souls will soar aloft, will be hurled down, among them 
perhaps you and I. We, however, discuss these deepest 
and highest things coolly and calmly as we would a prob- 
lem in mathematics^ and discussions that bear on eternal 
things have come to be mere oratorical tournaments in 
lecture-halls and classrooms, where all depends upon who 
can unhorse his opponent and gain the applause of the 
multitude and of the court. 

What did an "evangelical" Church do when Professor 
Harnack's false ''Essence of Christianity," distributed 
everywhere and everywhere discussed by scholars, en- 
thused and deceived thousands? Did those who still say 
with all their heart, '*It is written!" — did believing prel- 
ates and pastors, elders of the Church, and members of 
the congregation rise as one man against this heretic, and 
cry out, "That is not Christianity ; you teach falsehood ?" 
Such a deed would have made the angels in heaven, and 
Christ Himself, rejoice ; and a thunder-storm would have 
arisen and purified the air. But we are afraid of the 
storm. The watchmen on the towers of Zion slept, or 
wrapped themselves in "academic quietude." Individual 
protests were heard; several pamphlets appeared, which 
were read by few ; and that was all. 

Then Professor Delitzsch openly showed the ultimate 
end and results of criticism, and placed those who lacked 
courage to break loose from Harnack, before the ques- 



282 THE BIBLE THE WORD Of GOD. 

tion whether they would follow him also. He, by birth 
a member of the evangelical Church and a theologian 
said, in the presence of high representatives of this 
Church, of ministers of the cult and court-chaplains, of 
the chancellor of the empire, and of the emperor, "It was 
one of the greatest errors of the human mind to consider 
the Old Testament a religious revelation." And they all 
keep their seats. What did the Church do here, too? 
Where was there, I will not say holy wrath and fiery in- 
dignation, but only a unanimous, energetic defense of 
the Word of God and a refutation of falsehood? Why 
do we exist? Why are we called Protestants? Or do 
we hope that dignified academic quietude in the face of 
error will impress the world forcibly? It is in vain! 
Just as the unrighteous world demands righteousness 
from us, so the cowardly and unbelieving world demands 
a regardless testimony from us; and the world which 
delights in the words generosity and tolerance, deep down 
in its heart respects only firm and rugged men of thor- 
ough conviction. 

True, there have appeared in answer to Professor De- 
litzsch's lecture a veritable flood of ''Babel and Bible" 
pamphlets, and a numerous public has eagerly read them. 
But how few of them courageously and openly defended 
the entire truth of the entire Bible! On the contrary, 
most of these pamphlets, and the opinions elicited by 
reading them, showed how wavering and uncertain, how 
unclear, confused, superficial, and worthless the faith and 
Christianity of so many scholars are, and how many, who 
write and speak on revelation, do not know what reve- 
lation is. 

Now Professor Harnack has gone a step farther. He 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 283 

has taken sides with Professor Delitzsch, ascribes to him 
"the merit of having borne a correct view of the Old Tes- 
tament into wide circles," and says that Wellhausen in 
his classic history of Israel had long ago proved that 
the Old Testament contains myths and legends from 
Babylon. Upon this Professor Zillessen writes in the 
''Bvangelische Volksschtde:^^ "The situation is now 
clear. Harnack has unmasked himself (which was hardly 
necessary) before all Protestant Christendom, and it will 
now appear how much spiritual power and how much 
life of God there is still left m the evangelical Church. 
Henceforth the evangelical Church must oppose unbe- 
lief, nourished and promoted by theologians within its 
own gates." God grant it may! But what happened, 
when Kirchenrat Rupprecht, his whole heart glowing for 
God and the Church, opposed Harnack's book ? On both 
sides the man was smiled at. Why fall into a passion or 
become personal about theological questions, as though 
it were a matter that concerned the salvation of individual 
souls! It certainly is proper that such questions be dis- 
cussed as calmly and theoretically as possible! Forcible 
language and warmth would be more in place against 
sects and associations which entertain narrow views of 
conversion and sanctification, such as the Church does 
not hold; but what does it matter if within the Church 
a Professor of Church History in good standing elo- 
quently lectures to hundreds ori his self-fabricated, anti- 
biblical Christianity, and rejects, one by one, the funda- 
mental truths of the Church and all its articles of faith? 
Besides, such things have happened before. (See above, 
lecture by Professor Krueger on "Modern Science and 
Christianity.") Opinions go free, and every view is to 



284 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

some extent justified. Yes, even those of the devil and 
of demons. They believe that there is a God, and a per- 
sonal God withal, and tremble before His wrath; they 
witness that Jesus is the Son of God, the Most High, 
and believe in a final judgment and in torments of hell; 
they do not even occupy the extreme left. 

Even orthodox papers, instead of championing the 
cause of truth against falsehood, endeavored to find some- 
thing good in a book that had so generally, and even in 
the highest circles, been received with favor. His denial 
of miracles is mere "superficiality" ( !) ; much in his work 
can serve as a "bridge to truth" (hence is recommended 
to the simple seeker). Others praised in accustomed 
terms the "refreshing warmth of heart," or "the high 
moral earnestness," and extolled the enthusiasm that Har- 
nack calls forth among his students, as well as his per- 
sonal piety. We are not dealing, however, with what 
Professor Harnack is, but with what he teaches; and 
what do the most excellent gifts profit, if they are devoted 
to the service of falsehood? Another paper naively re- 
marked that Harnack might at least be used as an anti- 
dote for Nietzsche. Morphine against prussic acid ! 

Such indulgence, such clever attitude on the part of 
colleagues, even in the face of clear falsehood, appears 
good to men, and is lauded by them; but Jesus did not 
come into the world to bring such peace. "He that hateth 
not his father and mother and brothers and sisters for 
My name's sake, is not worthy of Me." How Paul, a 
theologian of no mean rank, judges concerning those who 
proclaim another Gospel than the one preached by him in 
the power of the Holy Ghost, is seen in Gal. i, 8, 9 ; and in 
2 John X, II, is seen what the apostle of brotherly love 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 285 

and the favorite of the Lord considers the proper attitude 
toward such heretics. "For he that biddeth him God- 
speed is partaker of his evil deeds." 

Does Professor Harnack's work contain nothing that 
is true and good? Certainly! But even if there were 
much more in it that is true and good, the Christian could 
no more partake of it than of wholesome food into which 
poison had been dropped. Whoever casts the Son out of 
the Gospel, w^hatever else he may proclaim, his word is 
less than useless. This, too, is Biblical doctrine. 

Looking upon the faithful witnesses shown in the his- 
tory of martyrs, one would shed tears of shame, above all 
on account of himself, then on account of our Christianity, 
which is eloquent, but careless, fearful of men, and cow- 
ardly in witnessing. One must blush for .shame when he 
sees how thousands of men, young as well as aged, tender 
women and young children suffered being tortured to 
death, in order to witness before God and men against 
heresies, many of which were not as destructive as those 
we dispassionately hear in periodicals, in books and lec- 
tures, in our daily life, from our acquaintances, or from 
pretended ministers and teachers of the Word. 

And yet easy terms were at times granted these mar- 
tyrs. B. G.y when a friendly proconsul said, ''Do but 
touch the sacrificial animal silently with your finger, and 
I shall let you go free." But "they accepted no deliv- 
erance." (Heb. xi, 35.) Or when an inquisitor de- 
manded of a heretic, "Do but subscribe to *I believe in the 
only true apostolic Church.' " But he perceived w^hat 
was meant, did not subscribe, and was burned to death. 
Ay! stubborn fanatics! We, to-day, are not so foolish. 
Expecting from a young divine an energetic protest 



286 THB BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD. 

against heretics, I once received from a pious man the 
reproving reply, "You do not consider that his position 
might be endangered by it." Under such circumstances, 
of course. . . . True, in connection with Luther 
celebrations we sing vigorously and joyfully, 

"Though they take our life, 
Goods, honor, child, and wife. 
Let all go amain! " 

But in our day every sensible Christian sees that one 
can not risk his position for the sake of witnessing to his 
faith. How will a child of God without position fare? 
"Even though I should oppose, as you think I ought," 
answered another, "it would not change matters; what 
purpose would it serve?" Probably none, save that 
Christ would some day confess you before His Father and 
His holy angels. But we no longer reflect upon such dis- 
tant possibilities. 

One feels like smiling, however, at those who look 
upon our ecclesiastical conditions, which are confused, 
and without power and confession, as an ultimate acquire- 
ment, as a beautiful adjustment of opposites, and as a 
definitive European equilibrium. These friends of peace 
will also be bitterly disappointed ; for Christ is the same 
yesterday, to-day, and forever, and the world is world, 
and will remain world. Between the two, between truth 
and falsehood, Christ and Belial, there is no peace possi- 
ble. True, in our day we lack material for powerful per- 
secutors as well as for faithful, joyous martyrs; we are 
too humane, too liberal, too tolerant for this. But if 
God permits the minds of men to be shaken hither and 
thither again, persecutions will soon begin anew, as un- 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 287 

merciful and bloody as ever. Of the last time it is writ- 
ten: "And they that understand . . . shall fall by 
the sword, and by flame, by captivity, and by spoil, 
. . . to try them, and to purge, and to make them 
white, even to the time of the end." (Dan. xi, 33, 35.) 
And when the man of sin, the Uehermenschj shall arise, 
then the great tribulation shall begin, *'such as was not 
from the beginning of the creation which God created 
unto this time." But who believes this word in our day? 
As a consequence of this indefiniteness and unclear- 
ness in matters of religion, and as a second evil fruit of 
criticism, there is unfortunately creeping in among our 
people a dismal, ever-growing distrust toward the serv- 
ants of the Church. To proclaim God unto men, to be a 
minister of His Word, is a great honor. What a multi- 
tude of such servants of God will some day follow Him 
who appears upon a white horse, and whose "name is 
called The Word of God" (Rev. xix, 11-13) ; and on 
earth, even in his outward appearance, such a man, grown 
old and gray in faithful service for his Lord and in the 
proclaiming of His truth, is beautiful and venerable. But 
what if the servant assumes the place of master, and from 
his pulpit, in high-sounding, empty words bases the divine 
Word on human science? The day is past in which the 
congregation, persuaded that the parson could speak only 
true things, calmly and trustingly accepted every word 
spoken from the pulpit. The right of free research is 
preached to us. Well and good, — then we shall search 
freely ; search, as the Scriptures permit us to do ; search, as 
did the noBle Jews in Berea. They "searched the Scrip- 
tures daily, whether those things were so," as Paul had 
proclaimed to them. (Acts xvii, 11.) We laymen, too, 



288 THB BIBLE THE WORD OF COD, 

partake of the spirit of criticism ; we, too, wish to investi- 
gate, to compare, and to test what is told us as to its genu- 
ineness. We, too, want nothing but truth. And we can 
not harmonize that, as CathoHcs have deridingly re- 
marked, from the same pulpit there are preached to us 
belief and unbelief, the Bible and criticism, Luther in the 
forenoon and Harnack in the afternoon ; or that a servant 
of the Church who, in entering upon his office, solemnly 
said : *1 vow before God, that to the best of my knowl- 
edge and foi" conscience' sake I will teach and proclaim 
the Gospel of Christ as it is contained in the Holy Scrip- 
tures, and witnessed to in the first 'Unaltered Augsburg 
Confession,' and in the remaining confessions of the 
Evangelic Lutheran Church," should then, by word of 
mouth and pen, teach the opposite of what is found in 
the Scriptures and in the Augsburg Confession. How 
can a man who, like Harnack, considers the record of the 
birth of Jesus to be "unauthentic stories," reverently cele- 
brate Christmas with his congregation; or Good Friday, 
since he does not believe in the reconciliatory death of 
Christ; or Easter, and deny His resurrection? We can 
not understand how a minister of the Gospel who does not 
believe in the Trinity, and with criticism considers the 
baptismal command (Matt, xxviii, 19) to be spurious, can 
nevertheless solemnly baptize little children "in the name 
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," or can still 
salute his congregation with — "The grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the 
Holy Ghost be with you all !" We can not comprehend 
how such a man, who theoretically holds that answers to 
prayer are impossible, can still reverently oflfer the Lord's 
Prayer before the congregation, or how this man, who 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 2S9 

considers belief in miracles to be antiquated, can still from 
his pulpit solemnly read passages of Scripture in which 
miracles are reported. Thus Dr. J. Johannsen, an enemy 
of all confessions and whom no one will suspect of ortho- 
doxy, writes: "These liberal theologians have not the 
courage of truth, to change a confession which they re- 
ject, but in their churches they still read the old confes- 
sions and offer the old prayers, which, according to their 
clarified view, they must hold to be an illusion." 

On this account believing ministers of the Gospel 
must suffer also, must suffer to be looked upon as mere 
rhetoricians. It pains us lay Christians to have such 
write us repeatedly, "In our day the word of a believing 
layman has greater value, weight, and influence, than the 
word of a parson." This ought not to be, and it is an 
abnormal, unhealthy state of affairs. 

It is evident that criticism must weaken the sermon. 
Through it the majestic Old Testament comes to be for 
young theologians a book sealed with seven seals. They 
do not know what to do with it, and works like Krum- 
macher's "Elijah the Tishbite," come to be impossible. 
They do not proclaim the Word of God from their pul- 
pits — for they no longer believe in it — but their own 
word; and ofttimes the sermons of these critics remind 
one strikingly of their opinion of John's Gospel, quoted 
above. Not a trace of anything they themselves have 
experienced! Everything has either been taken from 
sources, or freely wrought out according to definite view- 
points. They place events in a strange light, illustrate 
lofty thoughts by fancied situations, and do not under- 
stand the sense of the documents used as source. The 
discourse can not proceed from an immediate disciple 
19 



^90 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

of Jesus. But even non-critical preachers no longer un- 
derstand how to utilize two-thirds of the Bible, the law, 
and the prophets. And they are fearful of being reck- 
oned biased, rude, and intolerant; they endeavor so to 
speak the truth that it may not touch any one unpleas- 
antly, and to claim only what is indisputable and undis- 
puted; and of their sermons the verdict passed by a lady 
on a sermon she had heard is often true, "All beautiful 
and good, and now we can lie down again and slumber 
on till next Sunday." "Why," asks Fr. Spemann ("From 
the Renaissance to Jesus"), "Why does the preaching of 
the Word so often walk on noiseless soles in our day? 
Why does the sermon wear felt shoes? Why do we al- 
ways assume an apologetic tone? We are not to act on 
the defensive, we are not to offer excuses, we are to at- 
tack. We are state attorneys, and over against us all 
mankind is occupying the prisoner's box. High treason 
has been committed, a terrible deed." This mankind has 
murdered the Son of the Most High, who had brought 
them heaven. Repent and be converted; for now also 
the ax is laid unto the root of the trees. And he sighs : 
"O that men full of holy enthusiasm would again mount 
the pulpit ! O that voices would again be stifled by tears ! 
O that countenances would glow again !" 

But, of course, to a proper position of preachers and 
hearers would belong that, once for all, they break with 
the great illusion and false doctrine that we are a nation 
of Christians. The Germans are no more a nation of 
Christians than England, or America, or other nations 
that call themselves Christian. Let us open our eyes! 
Our legislation, our Reichstag, our politics are not Chris- 
tian, — this was openly admitted by their leader; our art, 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 291 

our literature, our daily press, our stage, these chief mani- 
festations of the character of the nation, are not Christian, 
but Anti-Christian. Cities like Berlin with its immoral 
street-life ; others, in which, like in the second largest city 
of Germany, only three per cent of the population frequent 
the churches, ninety-seven per cent therefore feel no need 
of religious worship; those which with great majority 
elect a social-democrat (even though an irreproachable 
one) as their representative, — are not Christian cities. 
The multitude that fills our courts and streets, our beer- 
halls, theaters, and railway trains, does not consist of 
Christians; and it is a great, harmful lie, to proceed 
from the presupposition that this unbelieving, and in part 
godless, multitude presents the Church, the congregation 
of Christ, because they are baptized and confirmed. 

Biblical criticism, with all its negations, proves it- 
self, not only utterly helpless in the presence of these de- 
plorable conditions and this gloomily growing flood of 
social-democracy; it not only positively aids the latter, 
by strengthening the multitude in its unbelief and its an- 
tipathy to the Bible, the Church, and the clergy, but, what 
is more alarming, it estranges from the Church even be- 
lieving Christians, hence the Church's best support. This 
is frankly admitted by servants of this Church, who other- 
wise belong to its zealous defenders. Thus one writes 
in "Alter Glaube'' (Vol. II, No. 21), "Through the un- 
belief that is being proclaimed from our pulpits, and is 
suffered to be proclaimed extensively and undauntedly, 
greater and greater circles of our people who believe in 
the Bible, are being estranged from the Church." That 
it has not even gained the respect of outspokenly anti- 
ecclesiastical circles, and what even pronounced enemies 



292 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

of all religion think of it, is shown by the socialistic leader, 
Franz Mehring, in the verdict he passes on Harnack: 
"An orthodox man, who believes in the letter, and defends 
his faith with holy zeal, can still be an object of respect; 
but such a criticism of the Gospels, which is conducted 
with genuine theological subterfuges, can not." 

The fruits of Biblical criticism are not good. 

Christ prophesies : "Beware of false phophets, which 
come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are 
ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.'' 
*'Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? 
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit ; but a 
corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree can 
not bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring 
forth good fruit." (Matt, vii, 15-18.) And the apostle 
says, "For the time will come when they will not endure 
sound doctrine, but will heap to themselves teachers, and 
will turn away their ears from the truth, and will be 
turned unto fables." (2 Tim. iv, 3, 4.) 

If we say this, we are accused of failing to practice 
mercy toward such as differ with us in faith. God gra- 
ciously preserve us from meriting this accusation. We 
extend a brother's hand to every one, even to the Cath- 
olic or Greek priest or monk, who believes that Christ 
is the only begotten Son of the Father, that He died for 
our sins, and that the Bible is the Word of God. He is 
not our brother who does not believe this; we can love 
him, however, as our neighbor, can live with him in 
peace, and combat His views with might. But when 
those who ought to be ministers of the divine Word make 
this Word despicable, and treat the men who wrote it, 
and of whom the world was not worthy, as dishonest 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 293 

knaves, who have composed, distorted, falsified, and in- 
vented miraculous stories, then there can no longer be 
any thought of mercy, but only of justice. Then we 
Christians, too, must guard an honor, that of our heavenly 
Father and His children ; then it is time to tell these gen- 
tlemen that they have made their presence in good com- 
pany (and by this we mean the true children of God) 
impossible, and that we can no longer wish them God- 
speed. (2 John X, II.) 

Then, with virtuous indignation, our opponents throw 
up to us intolerance, our fanatical zeal, and exclaim : 
You one-sided, gruff, stern believers ought not straight- 
way to accuse of heresy and damn every one who can 
not share your literal faith and your rigid orthodoxy. 
In spite of this he may be deeply religious and morally 
earnest, and perhaps better than many of you; besides, 
there is progress possible even in the religious standpoint, 
and many a man, who for the present sees in Christ the 
teacher of purest morals, may gradually rise to a higher 
conception of Him. 

To this we answer: We damn no man; for we do 
not hold the keys of heaven and hell. But Christ Him- 
self, and the entire Word of God, damns him who does 
not believe. "If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die 
in your sins." (John viii, 24.) "He that believeth on 
Him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is con- 
demned already." (John iii, 18, et al.) These clear 
words are no fault of ours. Or is it to be true tolerance 
and genuine brotherly love, if, seeing a blind man on a 
wrong way that leads to an abyss, I call to him, "Just 
go on ! You will see by and by that you are lost ?" The 
Bible knows nothing of an evolution, of a progress in 



294 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD. 

error, or a bridge of falsehood, which leads to truth ; and 
as it knows nothing of a narrow heavenly path that grad- 
ually descends, so it knows nothing either of a narrow 
heavenly path that gradually descends, so it knows noth- 
ing either of a broad road that leads heavenward again in 
gentle curves. We can see daily how moderate critics, who 
make human reason and human wisdom the judge of 
divine revelation; how Christian socialists, who want to 
invent a salvation for mankind other than Jesus, the cruci- 
fied ; how wits, who preach high morality and self-culture, 
and know a way to the Father other than that shown by 
the Son, get farther and farther away from the goal. 
Slight doubts grow stronger, lead to unbelief, unbelief to 
mockery, and the end is more or less concealed atheism, 
however little they want to have it called so. In fact they 
no longer believe in the personal living God. The Word 
says man must turn from the way that leads to hell. He 
must turn his back upon the goal pursued till now, must 
strive after the goal he had left behind, must put aside 
his reason and his wisdom, and must pray for God's 
Spirit, must again become as a little child. But who could 
expect such things from the proud minds, the princes of 
science, and those versed in the Scriptures, who greete'd 
with a storm of applause, make their own intellect master 
of God and His Word, and declare to a reverently listen- 
ing multitude what and how they are to believe and not 
to believe. ''They shut up the kingdom of heaven against 
men ; for they neither go in themselves, neither suffer they 
them that are entering to go in." (Matt, xxiii, 13.) 

Well, now, ye critics and despisers of the Bible, great 
and small, pass by our "unscientific, simple, massively 
childlike [read childish] faith in the Bible," and our 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 295 

''holy onesidedness," with a smile of superiority and a 
shrug of contempt, and proceed to the order of the day, 
in order that among yourselves you may say indignantly : 
''Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on 
Him? But this people who knoweth not the law are 
cursed." That does not awe us, and does not confuse us, 
and we would not wish to barter your scorn and contempt 
for your praise and friendship; but we greatly lament 
the desolation your heresies, like a creeping pestilence, 
have caused in the Church. We lament the hundreds of 
young men who often confess that they have been robbed 
of their faith; the thousands of souls that, disturbed by 
the word of such faithless preachers, have wavered and 
doubted, and perhaps have forever lost their peace. What 
shall these poor people do with your high-sounding, — in 
fact, spiritless and worthless — hypotheses, with your 
moral sugar-water, and your would-be gospel without 
Christ, without forgiveness of sin, and without eternal 
life? How pale this all grows in the face of the terribly 
real needs of life; how it shrivels up to nothing, when 
the majesty of death approaches man, and the fear of 
God falls upon the soul! "O vicar," a dying woman 
anxiously exclaimed, "have you nothing more to tell me?" 
But he know nothing else ; and how could he have prayed 
with her after he had been taught in the schools that God 
can neither hear nor answer prayer ? 

You have destroyed the congregation of Christ; but 
God will destroy you. 

When we reflect upon present ecclesiastic theological 
conditions, we can not ward off gloomy thoughts con- 
cerning the future of the Church. The saddening feature 
is not the fact that heretics rise up in the Church — this, 



296 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

according to Christ's prophecy, has occurred at all times 
— but the fact that the Church no longer has power to 
react against such. If there still were an energetic 
Church discipline, a nucleus of men who guarded the true 
doctrine, an authority that deprived such heretics of the 
right to teach and preach, then there were hope; but 
where are such ? They are rather listened to and looked 
up to with enthusiasm by members of the Church, high 
and low, as the heralds of a new and better gospel; and 
the Church itself grants to every heresy "air and light" 
in its schools. If an organism no longer has healthy 
force enough to expel harmful and destructive elements, 
it is an evil omen for its subsistence. A Church that 
quietly goes on counting public deniers of God, blasphem- 
ers, mockers, and despisers of the Bible and Christianity, 
pronounced enemies of all religion, and thousands, yea, 
several millions of their followers as members in good 
standing, and suffers its servants to call such blessed 
when performing their funeral rites, is not healthy. 
''What communion hath light with darkness? And what 
concord hath Christ with Belial?" (2 Cor. vi, 14, 15.) 
A Church that knows two kinds of truth, one scientific- 
critical for theologians, and another popular-edifying for 
the congregation, no longer stands in the truth. Paul, 
departing, says to his congregation, ''I am pure from the 
blood of all men ; for I have not shunned to declare unto 
you all the counsel of God." (Acts xx, 26, 2y.) A 
Church whose most distinguished teachers combat its 
confession of faith, whose professors deny what its min- 
isters preach, whose students of theology are taught to 
despise the Word which they are to preach as parsons, 
judges itself. ''Every kingdom divided against itself is 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM, 297 

brought to desolation." Here nothing is to be gained by 
coloring, by covering up, by putting off with a haughty 
smile, by offering pious comfort, and by crying peace, 
peace. If critical theology has done away with the Old 
Testament and the New, and has sawed off the limb on 
which it sits, it has no longer a right to exist. The Moor 
has done his duty, the Moor may go. For moral Sunday 
lectures (and why on Sundays at all?) on duels, the train- 
ing of children, the treatment of servants, and general 
self-culture of man, who do not need theologians or 
churches or pastors ; and it is one of the signs of the times 
that in widely read periodicals, like the Gruenen and 
other papers, laymen assume the intellectual leadership 
among scholars. The critical putting aside of the Old and 
the New Testament has undermined the foundations of 
the Church, and the entire structure is tottering. Luther 
writes : "Where the Bible ends, there the Church ends." 
"The right of a Church to exist does not depend upon 
its being recognized as such by other Churches, nor upon 
its being recognized by the laws of the State" (nor upon 
its historic past), "but upon its being recognized by the 
Head of the congregation, and this recognition will de- 
pend upon the recognition which the Head of the con- 
gregation receives in said Church." (Limbach, Siehe, Br 
kommt! p. 122.) 

Rome is not to be feared. Outward enemies have 
never yet harmed the Church. Against them our God is 
a mighty fortress, and His Word a defense and weapon. 
If we were men of faith, like Luther, with the Bible in our 
hands,, we would, like him, easily conquer pope and Jesuit 
and monk. "I have done nothing," he says, "the Word 
has done it all." By what means did this man, by the 



298 THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD. 

help of God, bring about the Reformation and defeat 
Rome? By the doctrine of justification through faith in 
the sufficient merit of Christ alone. Whoever rejects this 
corner-stone and foundation-stone of true Protestantism 
can no longer honestly call himself a Protestant and 
Lutheran, and his fight against Rome will be in vain. If 
we ourselves throw away our breastplate, and break our 
sword, God can, and will, no longer help us. 

It is a grave and deplorable thing that so many hon- 
est-minded people still cling reverentially to ecclesiastic 
forms, and overlook the terrible loss. The adornment of 
the ''house of God," altar, crucifix, and host, surplice and 
pulpit, and the accustomed routine of public service, are 
more important to them than the question whether the 
true doctrine of Christ is being proclaimed from the pul- 
pit, or the shallow morals of modern enlightenment ; and 
thoughtless men, and women without judgment, believe 
that they are serving God if, on Sundays in some church, 
they listen with more or less external reverence to a dis- 
course, not on, but against the Gospel of Christ. Of the 
external orders in the Church, Luther says in ''Deutsche 
Messe-'' "They are of human origin, and may be put 
away by men at any moment. We do not establish such 
order for the sake of those who are already Christians, 
for they need none of these things; they serve God in 
the spirit." Others place the catechism by the side of, 
if not above, the Scriptures, cry, "Lutheran ! Lutheran !" 
and think that in this word they have found the remedy 
for all the ailments of the Church; and yet scarcely one 
believes and teaches what Luther believed and .taught. 
"True disciples," says Luther, "do not believe in Luther, 
but in Jesus Christ," and adds, "Even I myself do not 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 299 

know Luther." (Cf. i Cor. iii, 3-8.) Others call them- 
selves Reformed, United, Ritschlians, Harnackians, etc., 
anything but Christians. But, of course, who knows, in 
our day, what is to be understood by a Christian? It is 
one of the gravest signs of the times that this lofty name 
in our day has come to be so meaningless and worthless, 
because of its utterly wrong interpretation and its abuse. 
It will not be installed in its rights again prior to the 
persecutions of the future. 

But the Word of God can not be bound. Gradually 
a reaction will take place, and more and more earnest souls 
will tire of the husks of liberal theology. Thus a French 
religious periodical writes: "What we now need is not 
more destruction, but reconstruction; let us return to the 
powerful and succulent exegesis of Calvin" (and Luther), 
"instead of German exegesis, which is almost exclusively 
busied with investigations bearing on authors and dates." 
The Spirit bloweth where He listeth, and you hear the 
sound thereof. In thousands He awakens a hunger and 
thirst for the entire Scriptures, and for the unadulter- 
ated teachings of Christ ; and everywhere true Christians 
assemble, who for themselves search the Word of God, 
and will not have the false and spiritless results of so- 
called science forced upon them as Christianity. I be- 
lieve in the communion of saints. I believe in the true 
priesthood of all believers, (i Peter ii, 9.) Thereby a 
favorite thought of Luther's, the realization of which be- 
gan in the ^'Stunden'' of the Pietists and Hahn Brethren, 
is being fully realized : the ecclesiola in the ecclesia. He 
writes in ^^ Deutsche Messe :" "Such as want to be Chris- 
tians truly, and to witness to the Gospel with hand and 
mouth, should enter their names, assemble in some house 



300 THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

for prayer, reading, baptism, receiving the sacrament, 
and for performing other Christian works. Here Church 
discipHne can really be exercised." And in his Maundy 
Thursday sermon (1523) he says, "Such as truly be- 
lieve, should assemble in a separate place, and have their 
own divine worship." The great reformer clearly per- 
ceived the far-reaching difference between evangelization 
and divine service. It is the lack of clearness regarding 
this difference that cripples the sermon of to-day, which 
is addressed now to godless persons or socialists or Roman 
Catholics who are not present, now to children of the 
world and nominal Christians who are accosted as bap- 
tized persons, now to true Christians and believers. 

Christ preached the Gospel to everybody and every- 
where, in the boat and on the mountain. He celebrated 
divine service in the upper room, when he brake bread 
with His disciples and offered His high-priestly prayer. 
There, too, the one false brother went out. But the Lord 
left the world outside. The field in which "wheat and 
tares should grow together until the harvest" is not the 
congregation of Christ; it is not the Church; it is the 
world. Christ says so. (Matt, xiii, 38.) 

Many a Christian begins to see that we have done 
what the Reformers earnestly warned against, — relied 
too much upon the aid of princes and of the State, and 
that this aid has done more harm than good to the Church. 
Pascal says, "The true state of the Church is, to be pro- 
tected only by God." And Calvin says : "Even though 
all the princes of the world should combine for the pur- 
pose of sustaining the Gospel, we should not rely upon 
them; but if, as it seems, almost all the world wants to 
hinder the onward course of truth, we must not doubt 
that God can bring to naught all their purpose. He will 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM. 301 

do above all we believe and hope." (Calvin, 0pp. V, p. 
680-684.) Will the movement alluded to above lead to 
a free Church in France, as appearances seem to indicate? 
We do not mistake the dangers that are connected with 
such a Church as well; but pointing them out does not 
answer the question. If such a Church answers the re- 
quirements of the Scriptures better than the present order, 
the true Christian must strive to realize it. We Chris- 
tians are not here for the sake of the Church, but the 
Church is here for the sake of us. The Church is not an 
end, but a means, — a means for the visible presentation 
of the congregation of Christ, for the realization of the 
communion of saints, for edification in and upon the 
teachings of the divine Word, and for the worship of God 
in spirit and in truth. Wherever the Church is not this, 
it is less than worthless, and may pass away and perish. 
It is no misfortune ; the cause of Christ will not go under 
on that account. 

Concerning the polity of the first Church in matters 
of doctrine it is reported: "It pleased the apostles and 
elders, with the whole Church, to send chosen men of 
their own company, . . . and they wrote letters by 
them after this manner: The Apostles and elders and 
brethren, . . . for it seemeth good to the Holy 
Ghost and to us." (Acts xv, 22-28.) 

Whether it will ever come to that again, God alone 
knows ; we will let Him dispose. It is His custom, in His 
own time, to shatter religious forms and institutions, even 
though they be many hundred years old and be ever so 
venerable, in order that we may learn that He is not in 
need of our Churches and forms; and Christ, the true 
Lord of the Church, watches over His congregation. The 
gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 



V. 

BIBLICAL FAITH. 

"Lord, I believe! Help thou mine unbelief!" — MARK IX, 24. 

IvET us be brief. 

Is there a God? Yes. Without Him the material 
and the spiritual world is an unintelligible chaos, without 
sense and purpose. This God must be a personal, living 
God ; an impersonal God is no God ; and a dead God is 
folly. 

If this God of Life created us, why is death in us? 
Because we have fallen away from Him. Is this God 
and our Creator nevertheless concerned about our tem- 
poral and eternal welfare? Yes. How can we know it? 
Only through a revelation on His part. 

Has He given us such a revelation? Yes. He has 
at all times revealed Himself to individuals through ap- 
pearances, visions, and dreams, and to mankind as a 
whole through the written Word, the Bible, given to His 
servants. "If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord 
will make Myself known unto him in a vision, and will 
speak unto him in a dream. But with My servant Moses 
will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in 
dark speeches, and the similitude of the Lord shall he 
behold." 

What is the Bible therefore? A divine revelation. 
"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard. . . . God hath 

302 



BIBLICAL fAlTH, 303 

revealed them unto us by His Spirit." "The revelation 
of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto Him, to show unto 
His servants the things which must shortly come to pass." 
(Rev. i, I.) "The mystery of Christ is revealed unto 
His holy apostles and prophets by His Spirit." 

How did this revelation take place? In this manner, 
that the third person of the Godhead, the Holy Ghost, 
ever and ever enthused, filled, inspired a man, so that he 
could not do otherwise than speak and write what the 
Triune God wanted to impart to mankind through Him. 
"Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy 
Ghost." (2 Peter i, 21.) "This Scripture must needs 
have been fulfilled, which the Holy Ghost by the mouth 
of David spake before." (Acts i, 16.) "Behold, I have 
put My words in thy mouth." (Isa. li, 16; lix, 21 ; Jer. 

i,9.) 

Were these men not involuntary tools ? No ; no more 
than a Christian who from a full heart repeats the Lord's 
Prayer after Christ. 

But the style in which the Biblical authors write dif- 
fers individually. Yes, divine inspiration does not destroy 
individuality, it elevates it. 

Is it not possible that these men deceived themselves, 
and took their word to be the word of the Lord ; or that 
they were deceived in secondary matters that do not be- 
long to immediate revelation ? No ; for God willed that 
through them just these things, only these and nothing 
else, should be imparted to mankind. God knows no 
secondary matters. 

In the original, then, the Bible is verbally inspired? 
Yes. Christ says : "It is easier for heaven and earth to 
pass, than one tittle of the law to fail." (Luke xvi, 17.) 



304 THH BIBLB THE WORD OF GOD. 

Must a Christian believe the whole Bible? Yes. It 
is a unit, and man dare not select what he would believe, 
and what not. Whoever does not believe the Old Testa- 
ment, does not believe the New either. Paul testifies be- 
fore Felix, "I believe all things which are written in the 
law and in the prophets." (Acts xxiv, 14.) Christ came 
into the world in order that "all things be fulfilled, which 
were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, 
and in the Psalms, concerning Him." (Luke xxiv, 44.) 

Then I am to believe every miracle related in the 
Bible, however unreasonable it may be? Yes. There 
are no reasonable miracles, only unreasonable ones. It is 
childish to distinguish between easier and more difficult 
miracles; and unbiblical to distinguish between miracles 
belonging to the history of salvation, and other miracles. 
To grasp miracles by reason is the same as wanting to 
grasp sunlight or lightning with the hand. If you do not 
believe one of them, you are on the way to doubt all, and 
do not know what a miracle is. 

Is faith in miracles the pith and center of Biblical 
faith? Yes; faith in the miracle of miracles, Christ, 
eternal God, incarnate, conceived without sin, crucified 
for our transgressions, raised again the third day. "With- 
out controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God 
was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of 
angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the 
world, received up into glory." (i Tim. iii, 16.) 

But can not a man honor Christ, love Him, strive to 
follow Him, and call himself a Christian, without ac- 
knowledging His Deity ? No ; that is self-deception. Thus 
man ^^maketh God a liar; because he helieveth not the 
record that God gave of His Son." ( i John v, 10.) And 



BIBLICAL PAITH. 305 

the end is terror. ''If ye believe not that I am He, ye 
shall die in your sins." (John viii, 24.) Christ is the 
"King of aeons ;" "He upholds all things by the word of 
His power." (Heb. i, 3.) ^'He came of the fathers as 
concerning the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever/' 
(Rom. ix, 5.) This or nothing. 

But where does reason come in ? Nowhere. 

Then why did God give us reason ? For planting and 
building, buying and selling, marrying and being given 
in marriage. 

Did God not give us reason also for the purpose of 
judging His Word? No. To want to judge the Bible 
by reason is unreasonable, since the Bible rests upon mira- 
cles, which reason can not grasp. But if my reason is to 
be the criterion, and is able to tell me how much of the 
Bible I am to believe, then by equal right this must be 
true of every other man's reason ; and if we listen to them 
all in succession, not a word of the Bible remains valid. 

But must not hum^an erudition and science prove val- 
uable even in view of the Bible, and for Bible study ? No. 
"I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, be- 
cause thou hast hid these things from the wise and pru- 
dent/' (Matt, xi, 25.) 

What value are we to attach to historical, geograph- 
ical, and archaeological research in its relation to the 
Bible? Not much. For 1900 years God in His wisdom 
intentionally left the Christian world in ignorance con- 
cerning the history of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Baby- 
lonia, and yet the Bible was sufficient for them unto sal- 
vation. When Christ was tempted. He did not defeat 
His opponent by historic and other proofs, of which there 
were more and better ones at His disposal than at ours, 
20 



3o6 THB BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD, 

but by "It is written." Thereby He points out the way 
in which we should meet all suggestions of unbelief. 

But must we not read the Word of God understand- 
ingly; must we not search in it, compare, and examine? 
Yes. But not with our own understanding, but with that 
given us from above; for as the heavens are higher than 
the earth, so this Word is higher than human understand- 
ing. Luther writes : "We should lay aside our wisdom, 
and think thus concerning God's commands and affairs: 
If it seems foolish to me, there is in truth no other cause 
than that I am a great fool who can not comprehend or 
understand divine wisdom, for my foolishness and blind- 
ness hinder me." We must first believe in the Bible in 
order to understand it, and not want to understand it 
before we believe in it. Pascal says, "God wants to be 
loved (hence believed), before he manifests Himself as 
He is." But humanity, inasmuch as it knows the Bible, 
consists of many individuals, who for valid reasons do not 
want to believe it, and who would be sorry, if they were 
compelled to believe it, for it condemns them and their 
deeds; of some, who would like to believe it, and whom 
God grants the faith longed for, even though it be near the 
end of their life; and finally of such, as "bring into cap- 
tivity every thought to the obedience of Christ." 

Is Biblical criticism not allowable at all? No. The 
very name is arrogance; for he who criticises, considers 
himself wiser than that which he criticises. "They de- 
sire to be teachers of the law, and understand neither 
what they say, nor whereof they affirm." (i Tim. i, 7.) 
The wiser and more prudent a man considers himself to 
be in view of the Word of God, the more will God send 
him doubts and delusions. "Make the heart of this people 



BIBLICAL FAITH. 3^7 

fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest 
they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and 
tmderstand with their heart, and convert, and be healed." 
(Isa. vi, lo.) ''Behold, saith the Lord God, I will send 
a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst 
for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. And 
they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north 
even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word 
of the Lord, and shall not find it.'' (Amos viii, ii, 12.) 
It has come to pass. They seek it in Babylonia and in 
India, they turn over the leaves of their Bibles, and do 
not find the Word of God there. 

But have not noted and pious Christians practiced 
Bible criticism ? They will have to answer for it. 

Ought the Christian not to familiarize himself with 
the objections of critics in order to refute them, as cir- 
cumstances may require? No. (If it is not a part of 
his calling.) Shall we worry through thousands of vain 
contradictory human opinions? God forbid! "Avoid 
foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and 
strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and 
vain." (Titus iii, 9.) 

But is not the Bible very hard to understand? Yes, 
it is so difficult, so high, so deep, that it has never been, 
and never will be, fully understood by any man ; and yet 
so simple, so comprehensible and clear, that any child, or 
an ignorant old woman, or a beggar, finds in it all that is 
necessary unto salvation. And salvation, salvation, this 
is the one thing that is needful. "Except ye be converted, 
and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the 
kingdom of heaven." (Matt, xviii, 3.) 

But is the Bible not a gradual production, and were 



3o8 THB BIBLE THH WORD OP. GOD. 

its bcMDks not gradually collected ? Yes, according to the 
knowledge and will and eternal decree of God. 

Are there no other divine books except the canonical ? 
No. The canon is not ordained of men, but of God 
through men. "All Scripture is given by inspiration of 
God." 

How can I know the difference between the books of 
the Scriptures and other pious books, such as the Apoc- 
ryhpa, which have rightly been banished from the Bible 
by many Churches, the Reformed, the Anglican, and the 
Presbyterian, and of which Luther writes, "Books, which 
are not to be considered equal to the Holy Scriptures?" 
By the Spirit of God. 

To whom does God give this Spirit? To every one 
who asks Him. "If ye, being evil, know how to give good 
gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heav- 
enly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him ?" 
(Luke xi, 13.) 

Is the Bible therefore of heavenly origin? Yes; it 
is, as much as we understand of it, a copy of the heavenly 
"Scripture of truth" (Dan. x, 21), in which the angels 
read (Mai. iii, 16). 

What shall the Christian answer the scoffer who 
wants to prove to him that the Bible contains all kinds 
of mistakes, and errors, and contradictions, and things 
that are untenable ? Nothing. He is not concerned about 
the reason of the faith that is in you (i Peter iii, 15), but 
about the expression of His own conceited wisdom in 
holy things. We are not to give that which is holy unto 
the dogs, and it does not pay to contend with a blind man 
concerning light and colors. On account of his faith in 
the Bible, the Christian must suffer to be considered a 
fool by the world. 



BIBLICAL PAITH. 309 

What shall he say to the still doubting, honestly seek- 
ing questioner? "Take and read!" Ask God for en- 
lightenment, and you will behold a great light; if the 
Spirit of God does not enlighten you, neither your own 
speculation nor the wisdom of other men will help you. 

"That is going too far !" exclaim those who consider 
themselves wise, because they halt half way. No! not 
far enough. Christ says, "Till heaven and earth pass, 
one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law 
till it all be fulfilled." I do not believe in mere figurative 
expressions or exaggerations from the mouth of Him 
who says, "I am the Truth." Hence every jot and tittle 
of the law has its meaning and value, not manifest to us, 
but to the angels. 

Is not this a dead faith in the letter? That it is not, 
has at all times been proved by the life and works of 
those who have it. 

But such faith in the Bible is not up to date, is un- 
scientific, simple, childish, and contradicts the spirit of 
the age, as well as sound reason, and the interpretation 
and opinions of many learned and pious men. Yes. 

Let us once for all abandon all hope of ever inventing 
a faith in the Bible that will find grace in the sight of 
the world, no matter whether it call itself Christian or 
godless. Just as "the wisdom of this world is foolishness 
with God," so the wisdom of God is and will remain fool- 
ishness with this world. If your faith in the Bible does 
not bring upon you the opposition, the more refined or 
the grosser mockery, the silent or the outspoken contempt 
and hatred of the world, the educated, and the scholars, 
you may know thereby that it is not the true faith. Of 



3IO THB BIBLE THB WORD OF GOD. 

do you claim to be greater than your Master ? He spoke 
"words of eternal life," "and they mocked Him." 

Whoever had such faith in the Bible? Those who 
overcame the world by faith, the prophets, the apostles, 
the martyrs. 

But why must such be the only correct, true, and 
Christian faith in the Bible? Because it is and was the 
faith of Christ. 

Does Christ know anything of Bible criticism, or of 
inexactness or contradictions in the Bible? Does He 
warn against "spurious passages" or wrong statements 
regarding dates and authors, or does He distinguish be- 
tween a human and a divine word ? No. He, the Word, 
which was in the beginning and was God, believes His 
Word. He, who spoke through Moses and the prophets, 
believes Moses and the prophets. He who performed 
miracles, believes in the miracles of the Bible. He, the 
one risen from the dead, believes in the resurrection of 
the dead. He says, "The Scripture can not be broken." 
"It is written." 

Is such in our day not a forced faith, by which a 
Christian who believes in the Bible constantly endeavors 
against better knowledge to believe what to himself seems 
hardly credible? No. It is the exulting certainty of the 
soul that has at last found the rock amid the rolling and 
surging of the thoroughly uncertain opinions of men. 
Such a soul hungers and thirsts after firm faith in the 
Bible, for in such faith it finds strength and bliss. 

Is such not an immature faith, that bespeaks ignor- 
ance in all branches of human knowledge, will not endure 
closer scrutiny and further instruction, and is a hindrance 
to study and research? No. God grants it immediately 



BIBLICAL FAITH. 311 

to many simple and ignorant souls whom He loves; but 
with many great minds, too, such as Augustine, Calvin, 
Luther, Pascal, Newton, Leibnitz, and many others, it is 
the fruit and result of lifelong, earnest examining and 
studying of all human science and philosophy, prosecuted 
with prayer and enlightenment. 

Can a man in his own power, and by personal study, 
attain to such simple faith in the Bible? No. 

How can one attain to it ? Through God's grace, and 
persistent prayer that He might open our eyes. Then the 
Holy Ghost through much strife and doubting destroys 
the inner man, and reveals to him the utter blindness and 
impotence of his reason and wisdom in such a manner 
as to let him perceive clearly : I am nothing ; I have noth- 
ing; I can do nothing; I know nothing. Thereupon this 
Spirit shows him from the history of mankind, and from 
the present world, how vacillating, uncertain, contradic- 
tory, and erroneous are men's words, proofs, conclusions, 
opinions, and doctrines. Thus there is engendered in him 
contempt of human words and their vanity and impotence, 
inasmuch as they relate to that which is celestial, invisi- 
ble, divine, and eternal, and he begins to loathe the 
"sweepings" of the wisdom of this world. And when a 
man has been cured and emptied of superstitious belief 
in himself and in others, in the knowledge and ability of 
mankind, then the Spirit can fill him with true, childlike, 
simple faith in God and His Word. If he first has be- 
come a fool, the "Spirit of truth can guide him into all 
truth." 

Does God give His children such perfect faith in the 
Bible at one time? No! Through many conflicts he 
leads them to victory, through darkness to light. Just as 



312 THE BIBLB THE WORD OP GOD. 

young trees root deeply, when shaken by storms, so faith 
through doubts and tribulations. It is more precious 
than gold and silver, should not it too be tried by fire ? 

What does the Spirit of God effect through such faith 
in the Bible ? That the Word of God comes to be a living 
power in man, which saves him. This faith does not 
rest on proofs; for faith that needs proof is not faith. 
But to him who honors Him with such faith, God grants 
great and beautiful' proofs, as, e. g., in His answers to 
prayer. Then He shows him that this Word of God har- 
monizes with the entire creation, with the whole universe. 
The Bible alone explains nature, and nature in and about 
man harmonizes with the Bible. All other views of the 
world come forth out of the night of eternal nothingness, 
and eventually fall into uttermost darkness; they them- 
selves, too, know no other end. 

Further, from the history of the world the Spirit 
shows him who believes in the Bible,, the justice, holi- 
ness, and love of God ; and shows him how the prophecies 
of the Bible have clearly and literally been fulfilled. 

Finally, the Spirit shows that this Word in the past 
and the present, among the high and the lowly, among all 
nations, is the only Word and Book that has power to 
change sinful men into children of God ; the only one that 
teaches and enables men to live patiently and die happily. 
The Christian, whose soul is heartily tired of the inces- 
sant change of things, of phenomena that ever evade our 
grasp, of the monotonous and hollow song of human 
knowledge and ability, and of the falsehood of the world 
that is in him and about him, reaches out after this divine 
Word, and there finds absolute words, eternal rocks ; and 
in him the word of Christ is verified : "Come unto Me, 



BIBLICAL FAITH. 3^3 

all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
rest." 

Then he whom God has given this faith in the Bible 
laughs at all human proofs, discussions, and investiga- 
tions; at all ifs and buts of erudition and criticism, and 
praises God, who has thus manifested Himself unto men. 
"Thy Word, O Lord, restoreth my soul !" 



When I peruse this little book, I am seized with anx- 
iety. I feel as though God said to me: Child of man 
and worm of the earth, why do you make bold to defend 
My Word, as if it were in need of your defense ? Is not 
My Word a devouring fire, a hammer that breaketh the 
rock in pieces; is it not quick and powerful, and sharper 
than any two-edged sword, and w411 it not, even without 
your help, accomplish whereto I sent it? Have I not 
power to defeat opponents and scoffers, and will I not do 
it in due time, when this Word will appear, and the sword 
from His mouth will kill the third part of those who dwell 
on the earth? You who would instruct others, are you 
not yourself a shaking reed ? Does not your faith in the 
Bible often waver, and does not fear of men and their 
word, their reproach, and their scorn ever and ever come 
over you, as if you were accountable to them, and not to 
Me alone; as if they could help you, when, having come 
forth alone from death, you stand before Me to be 
judged? 

And I must reply: Yes, Lord! I know that Thy 
Word is not in need of being defended by my poor word. 
Yet Thou hast commanded us to confess our faith in Thee 
and Thy Word before men, and on the ground of this 



314 THB BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD, 

command I have ventured to do so. Forgive me for hav- 
ing spoken of Thy Word with unclean Hps ; and if I have 
spoken wrongly, forgive me according to Thy great 
mercy. Yea, Lord, the word of men passeth away, but 

Thy Word endureth forever. 



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